Delineation of built-up areas from very high-resolution satellite imagery using multi-scale textures and spatial dependence

Abstract

Very high spatial resolution (VHR) satellite images possess several advantages in terms of describing the details of ground targets. Extracting built-up areas from VHR images has received increasing attention in practical applications, such as land use planning, urbanization monitoring, geographic information database update. In this study, a novel method is proposed for built-up area detection and delineation on VHR satellite images, using multi-resolution space-frequency analysis, spatial dependence modelling and cross-scale feature fusion. First, the image is decomposed by multi-resolution wavelet transformation, and then the high-frequency information at different levels is employed to represent the multi-scale texture and structural characteristics of built-up areas. Subsequently, the local Getis-Ord statistic is introduced to model the spatial patterns of built-up area textures and structures by measuring the spatial dependence among frequency responses at different spatial positions. Finally, the saliency map of built-up areas is produced using a cross-scale feature fusion algorithm, followed by adaptive threshold segmentation to obtain the detection results. The experiments on ZY-3 and Quickbird datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method through comparisons with existing algorithms.