This paper presents a method for building roof contours extraction from digital image taken over complex urban scenes. The proposed method is based on the optimization of a snakes' energy function that represents building roof contours in digital images by using the dynamic programming optimization technique. As most of the building roof contours contains straight edges intercepting at right angles, appropriate geometrics constraints are enforced into the original snakes' energy function. The main advantage of using the dynamic programming algorithm for optimizing the snakes' energy function is the augmentation of the pull-in-range, when compared to the one that is usually obtained in the original solution based on variational approaches. Experimental evaluation, including visual inspection and numeric analysis, was performed by using real data and the obtained results showed the potentiality of the proposed method for extracting building roof contours from digital imagery.
Snake; Dynamic Programming; Building Extraction; Image Analysis
