A Method for Regularizing Buildings through Combining Skeleton Lines and Minkowski Addition

Abstract

With the increasing availability of remote sensing images, the regularization of jagged building outlines extracted from high-resolution remote sensing images has become a current research hotspot. Based on an existing method proposed earlier by this author for extracting the skeleton lines of buildings through integrating vector and raster data using jagged building skeleton lines as the input data, a new method is proposed here for regularizing building outlines through combining the skeleton lines with the Minkowski addition algorithm. Since the size and orientation of the structuring elements remain constant in the traditional morphological method, they can easily lead to large changes in the area between the regularized results and area of the original building. In this work, structuring elements are constructed with the adaptive adjustment of size and orientation. The proposed method has an outstanding ability to maintain the area of the original building. The orthogonal characteristics of the building can be better preserved via rotating the structuring elements. Finally, the angular bisector method is used to dissipate conflicts among the redundant vertices in the building outlines. In comparison to the simplification method used in QGIS software, the method proposed in this paper could reduce the variation in the area while maintaining the orthogonal characteristics of the building more significantly.