Unsupervised method for building detection using gabor filters

Abstract

Automatic methods are a convenient solution to extract buildings from remote sensing images. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised method to extract buildings by means of the Gabor filters and morphological operators. Our proposed method starts from a set of the Gabor filter parameters which is selected empirically to generate a two-dimensional impulse response. The convolution of the impulse response with the image of interest enhances the buildings and attenuates the background. Moreover, morphological operators are applied to further refine the resulting class of interest. The developed algorithm is applied on many remotely sensed images; the obtained results are highly satisfactory and promising.