The MURI Project for Rapid Feature Extraction in Urban Areas*

A summary of research in urban feature extraction being conducted under a MURI (multi-disciplinary research initiative) program sponsored by the U.S. Army Research Office is provided. Most of the paper focuses on extraction of rectilinear building models. Feature extraction from aerial images is difficult due to problems of segmentation, 3-D inference and shape description. A system for building modeling from multiple panchromatic images is described. Enhancements to this system using digital elevation models (DEMs) or thematic maps derived from hyperspectral images are described. Some results and quantitative evaluations are provided. A brief example of work on street grid extraction is also included. The work described here depends on analysis provided by researchers at Purdue University and Marconi Integrated Systems, Inc. who are partners in this multi-disciplinary project.