Extraction of windows in facade using kernel on graph of contours

Abstract

In the past few years, street-level geoviewers has become a very popular web-application. In this paper, we focus on a first urban concept which has been identified as useful for indexing then retrieving a building or a location in a city: the windows. The work can be divided into three successive processes: first, object detection, then object characterization, finally similarity function design (kernel design). Contours seem intuitively relevant to hold architecture information from building facades. We first provide a robust window detector for our unconstrained data, present some results and compare our method with the reference one. Then, we represent objects by fragments of contours and a relational graph on these contour fragments. We design a kernel similarity function for structured sets of contours which will take into account the variations of contour orientation inside the structure set as well as spatial proximity. One difficulty to evaluate the relevance of our approach is that there is no reference database available. We made, thus, our own dataset. The results are quite encouraging regarding what was expected and what provide methods the literature. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.