BREC: The Built-up area RECognition tool

This paper presents the overall structure and some examples of use for BREC (Building RECognition tool) software, developed by the Remote Sensing Group at the University of Pavia. The software allows detecting the characteristics of built-up areas at different scales, from urban extent delineation to individual building recognition, depending on the remote sensing data in input and their spatial resolution. A set of different tools for classification, feature extraction, and data fusion at the feature level have been developed and can be suitably combined to achieve the best results. All of them have been optimized for the analysis of urban areas and human settlements, and can be applied to both optical and radar images.