Building Extraction from Stereo Pairs of Aerial Images: Accuracy and Productivity Constraint of a Topographic Production Line

This paper presents the research that has been lead for a few years at IGN on automatic building extraction from aerial photographs. A description of the operational context and of the topographic application that is aimed at introduces the main constraints to be overcome. We give then a quick sketch of the building extraction process that has been worked out up to now, and develop its quality assessment on a test site. The analysis of the results underlines the part played by the planar approximation of disparities resulting of an area-based correlation process in the fulfilment of the accuracy requirements. Further research will focus on reliability improvement and on more complex shape handling.