Right‐Angle Rooftop Polygon Extraction in Regularised Urban Areas: Cutting the Corners

Abstract

Abstract Rapid urban development is achieved in some areas by the application of industrialized construction techniques. This approach creates extensive ‘‘regularised’’ urban areas, which are governed by a small set of building models. This paper describes a scheme for building rooftop extraction from aerial and high resolution satellite imagery that makes use of the characteristics of regularised urban areas. As the scheme is based on a bottom‐up approach, emphasis is put on reducing the number of low‐level features that should be considered during the polygon rooftop extraction. This is achieved with a set of geometric rules, which are defined based on the geometry of the building model. Experiments with real‐world imagery show that this basis provides efficient filtering of the right‐angle corners, thus improving the overall extraction performance.