Evaluating corner detectors for the extraction of man-made structures in urban areas

We analyze if the presence of corners in very high resolution (VHR) satellite images can give us an indication on the type of structure present in a scene (man-made versus natural structures). Two the corner detectors are validated in this respect: Harris and SUSAN. The detection performance is evaluated over a spectrum of spatial resolutions for current and future VHR systems (from 2 meters to 17 centimeters). The ground truth of this study consists of annotated image extracts containing different types of man-made structures, in which the relevant corners have been identified.