A 3D Feature for Building Segmentation based on Shape-from-Shading

An important cue that can assist towards an accurate building detection and segmentation is 3D information. Because of their height, buildings can easily be distinguished from the ground and small objects, allowing for their successful segmentation. Unfortunately, 3D knowledge is not always available, but there are ways to infer 3D information from 2D images. Shape-from-shading techniques extract height and surface normal information from a single 2D image by taking into consideration knowledge about illumination, reflectance and shape. In this paper, a novel feature is proposed that can describe the 3D information of reconstructed images based on a shape-from-shading technique in order to successfully acquire building boundaries. The results are promising and show that such a 3D feature can significantly assist in a correct building boundary detection and segmentation.