Support Vector Machines for Object Based Building Extraction in Suburban Area using Very High Resolution Satellite Images, a Case Study: Tetuan, Morocco

Many fields of artificial intelligence have been developed such as computational intelligence and machine learning involving neural networks, fuzzy systems, genetic algorithms, intelligent agents and Support Vector Machines (SVM). SVM is a machine learning methodology with great results in image classification. In this paper, we present the potential of SVMs to automatically extract buildings in suburban area using Very High Resolution Satellite (VHRS) images. To achieve this goal, we use object based approach: Segmentation before classification in order to create meaningful image objects using color features. In the first step, we form objects with the aid of mean shift clustering algorithm. Then, SVM classifier was used to extract buildings. The proposed method has been applied on a suburban area in Tetuan city (Morocco) and 83.76% of existing buildings have been extracted by only using color features. This result can be improved by adding other features (e.g., spectral, texture, morphology and context).