Semi-Automatic Detection and Extraction of Man-Made Objects in Multispectral Aerial and Satellite Images

Extraction of man-made objects in images is an important problem in computer vision. In this paper a general procedure to extract man-made objects in colour images of terrains using ‘Background Discriminant Transformation (BDT)’ is presented. BDT is simple to use, robust and application oriented. The procedure does not require extensive knowledge of the terrain. To illustrate the procedure an example is shown from an airborne colour image. However, the process has been also tested, and reported elsewhere, on spaceborne multispectral images such SPOT images. At this stage the process is semi-automatic.The procedure is implemented on an Image Processing CAD workstation. The workstation has Image Processing, CAD graphics and GIS modules interacting closely. This integrated system has the capabilities to perform the high-level image processing needed for image interpretation.