Estimation of Free Parameters of Morphological Profiles for Building Extraction Using SAR Images

Abstract

Nowadays, one of the most challenging issues in the field of remote sensing and satellite imagery is production of cadastral maps. Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images are among the most widely used satellite images in the last decade. Due to radar nature of these images, the buildings in SAR images face with two problems: shadow and layover. Morphological mathematics are efficient tools for detection of buildings with providing a contextual profile containing shape and geometrical characteristics of the objects in radar images. By using the suggested method, two characteristics of shadow and brightness are detected separately. Then, the construction areas are extracted by using a fuzzy fusion approach. In this method, various parameters such as size and direction of the structural element and the weighting factor of the shadow, bright area, and the recursive parameter have to be determined independently. To this end, an iterative method using MSE is suggested. The experimental results show a detection rate of 94.3% achieved by the proposed method.