Window extraction using geometrical characteristics of building surface

Abstract

This paper describes an approach to extract windows by analyzing geometrical characteristics of building surface. Firstly, building surfaces are detected and then wall region is extracted by using hue color of pixel; this step was well described in our previous works. The non-wall regions are considered as candidates of other components of building such as windows, doors, columns and so on. To extract the windows, the image of candidates is recovered in rectangular shape. Then the ambiguous candidates which have irregular shape, for example, long and thin or very small are coarsely rejected. The geometrical characteristics such as the center coordinates, area, aspect ratio and the aligned coexistence are used for extracting the windows. The proposed approach has been experimented for a database with 150 building surfaces comprising 1607 windows. We obtained 93.34% extraction rate. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.