Object-oriented detection of building shadow in TripleSat-2 remote sensing imagery
Yuxuan Liu, Yuchun Wei, Shikang Tao, Qiuping Dai, Wenyao Wang, Mengqi Wu
Abstract
The projection of objects on the earth’s surface caused by the sunlight produces shadows. They are inevitable in high-spatial-resolution satellite remote sensing images and reduce the accuracy of change detection, land cover classification, target recognition, and many more applications. Dark-colored land covers in these satellite images, such as water bodies, road, and soil, appear with similar spectral properties as those of shadows and often result in difficulty in shadow detection, especially in complex urban settings. We propose an object-oriented building shadow extraction method and tested it using six selected study areas from TripleSat-2 satellite imagery with 3.2-m spatial resolution. The method’s main steps include (1) selecting six image features that can highlight the shadow information and then segment the image based on edge; (2) extracting shadow region based on multiple object features; and (3) masking nonbuilding shadow regions by the shadow and dark object separation index, image features including spectral, textural, and geometric features, and contextual information. The average precision, recall, and F1-score of the shadow detection were 85.6%, 88.6%, and 87.0%, respectively, and the ranges were 73.0% to 91.0%, 76.6% to 94.1%, and 74.7% to 91.2%, respectively. Compared with multiscale segmentation, edge-based segmentation is more efficient and helpful to completely and accurately extract shadows.