Abstract
The development of a new Very High-Resolution (VHR) satellite sensor provides opportunities for mapping more details. The building extraction process is a challenging problem due to the misclassification between buildings and similar spectral objects. The main aim of this study is to introduce an approach to building rooftops border extraction. In this approach, a new index to highlight building areas using the capabilities of the WorldView-2 eight-bands VHR satellite images is presented. The developed index is then integrated into a complete approach to extract borders between buildings and their corresponding shadows. The building's rooftops boundaries are determined using a novel algorithm. The proposed approach is applied to five study areas and compared with three recent approaches for building extraction. The results of the comparison have illustrated that the proposed approach achieves the highest overall accuracy (average of 92.20%) and has the ability for detecting building rooftops separated from their façades.