No abstract

The development of street-level geoviewers become recently a very active and challenging research topic. In this context, the detection, representation and classification of windows can be beneficial for the identification of the respective facade. In this paper, a novel method for windows and facade retrieval is presented. This method, based on a similarity of graph of contours, introduces a new kernel on graph for inexact graph matching. We design a kernel similarity function for structured sets of contours which will take into account the variations of contour orientation inside a structure set, as well as spatial proximity. Then we are able to extract a window as a sub-graph of the graph of all contours of the facade image and to retrieve similar windows from a database of images of facades.

In the past few years, street-level geoviewers has become a very popular web-application. In this paper, we focus on a first urban concept which has been identified as useful for indexing then retrieving a building or a location in a city: the windows. The work can be divided into three successive processes: first, object detection, then object characterization, finally similarity function design (kernel design). Contours seem intuitively relevant to hold architecture information from building facades. We first provide a robust window detector for our unconstrained data, present some results and compare our method with the reference one. Then, we represent objects by fragments of contours and a relational graph on these contour fragments. We design a kernel similarity function for structured sets of contours which will take into account the variations of contour orientation inside the structure set as well as spatial proximity. One difficulty to evaluate the relevance of our approach is that there is no reference database available. We made, thus, our own dataset. The results are quite encouraging regarding what was expected and what provide methods the literature.