Roof-Cut Guided Localization for Building Change Detection from Imagery and Footprint Map

Identification and monitoring of buildings are of considerable practical value in three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction of building models and urbanization monitoring. Especially for the change detection of buildings with composite structures and relief displacements, heterogeneous appearance and positional inconsistencies are two outstanding issues. In this work, a novel roof-cut approach is developed using graph-based model to locate rooftops and demolished buildings through the use of imagery and preexisting building footprint maps. The building region, boundary, and rooftop contour constraint terms were first formulated by multiple cues derived from both data sources. Next, roof-cut segmentation was performed by gathering all terms required for high-quality unsupervised rooftop extraction. Finally, the positional displacement statistics of similar adjacent buildings were collected to accurately estimate the rooftop location and achieve building demolition detection with the overlap ratio index. Experimental results indicated the effectiveness and generality of the proposed roof-cut algorithm for aerial and satellite images.