DETECTING SHADOWS IN QUICKBIRD SATELLITE IMAGES

High resolution images provided by latest missions such as QuickBird, Ikonos or OrbView have opened a new and important age in the remote sensing field, mainly in those applications where is crucial to extract detailed information such as buildings, streets, vehicles, etc. The improvement in resolution makes also that something inherent to an image as shadows take on special significance. This paper reviews some previous published methods to detect shadows and analyzes their suitability for being applied to colour satellite images. Based on this study, this work presents a procedure which exploits colour invariants and image edges to accurately identify shadows in QuickBird images. The presented method has been successfully tested with images acquired under different lighting conditions and covering both urban and rural areas.

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