Building extraction from high-resolution satellite images in urban areas: recent methods and strategies against significant challenges

TLDR

Building extraction from high‑resolution satellite imagery in urban areas is complex, and prior work from 2005–2015 has not fully examined the combined impact of various challenges. This study investigates how non‑building features undermine building extraction accuracy. The authors review 2005–2015 strategies, evaluate their strengths and weaknesses, and fuse selected approaches into hybrid methods. Hybrid methods that use fewer, lower‑cost strategies outperform others and are applicable to diverse future case studies.

Abstract

Building extraction from high-resolution satellite images (HRSI) in urban areas is an intricate problem. Recent studies proposed different methods during 2005–2015. However, in HRSI, they have not investigated the effects of challenges altogether. This paper studies the effects of non-building features which are the main drawbacks in building extraction. To overcome each challenge, it reviews recent strategies between 2005 and 2015. The pros and cons of each strategy are discussed, and proper strategies are combined to generate hybrid methods. Lower cost and fewer strategies are efficient attributes to recognize the best hybrid methods. Hybrid methods can be useful for different case studies in the future.