Extraction of straight lines in aerial images

A straight-line extractor that produces line descriptions from aerial images is described. The input to the line extractor is in the form of an edge image, where the contrast and direction of each edge pixel is specified. The system scans the edge image left to right and top to bottom and assigns a line label for each scanned edge pixel, thereby generating a label image. At the end of this process, each edge pixel has a line label associated with it, and edge pixels that belong to the same line will be assigned the same line label. In addition, with each line label, a record that stores the end points, the average contrast, and the pixel support of the line is generated. The label image is used as a spatial index to further link fragmented lines. The authors also describe techniques for eliminating many of the physically insignificant lines, given that the domain of interpretation is aerial images dominated by man-made objects.<
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