Building height estimation via satellite metadata and shadow instance detection

Hanxiang Hao; Sriram Baireddy; Emily Bartusiak; Mridul Gupta; Kevin LaTourette; Latisha Konz; Moses Chan; Mary L. Comer; Edward J. Delp

doi:10.1117/12.2585012

12 April 2021 Building height estimation via satellite metadata and shadow instance detection

Hanxiang Hao, Sriram Baireddy, Emily Bartusiak, Mridul Gupta, Kevin LaTourette, Latisha Konz, Moses Chan, Mary L. Comer, Edward J. Delp

Author Affiliations +

Proceedings Volume 11729, Automatic Target Recognition XXXI; 117290L (2021) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2585012
Event: SPIE Defense + Commercial Sensing, 2021, Online Only

Abstract

Estimating building height from satellite imagery is important for digital surface modeling while also providing rich information for change detection and building footprint detection. The acquisition of building height usually requires a LiDAR system, which is not often available in many satellite systems. In this paper, we describe a building height estimation method that does not require building height annotation. Our method estimates building height using building shadows and satellite image metadata given a single RGB satellite image. To reduce the data annotation needed, we design a multi-stage instance detection method for building and shadow detection with both supervised and semi-supervised training. Given the detected building and shadow instances, we can then estimate the building height with satellite image metadata. Building height estimation is done by maximizing the overlap between the projected shadow region given a query height and the detected shadow region. We evaluate our method on the xView2 and Urban Semantic 3D datasets and show that the proposed method achieves accurate building detection, shadow detection, and height estimation.

Conference Presentation

Citation Download Citation

Hanxiang Hao, Sriram Baireddy, Emily Bartusiak, Mridul Gupta, Kevin LaTourette, Latisha Konz, Moses Chan, Mary L. Comer, and Edward J. Delp "Building height estimation via satellite metadata and shadow instance detection", Proc. SPIE 11729, Automatic Target Recognition XXXI, 117290L (12 April 2021); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2585012

ACCESS THE FULL ARTICLE

INSTITUTIONAL
Select your institution to access the SPIE Digital Library.

SELECT YOUR INSTITUTION

PERSONAL
Sign in with your SPIE account to access your personal subscriptions or to use specific features such as save to my library, sign up for alerts, save searches, etc.

PERSONAL SIGN IN

No SPIE Account? Create one

PURCHASE THIS CONTENT

SUBSCRIBE TO DIGITAL LIBRARY

50 downloads per 1-year subscription

Members: $195

Non-members: $335 ADD TO CART

25 downloads per 1 - year subscription

Members: $145

Non-members: $250 ADD TO CART

PURCHASE SINGLE ARTICLE

Includes PDF, HTML & Video, when available