Salient Building Outline Enhancement and Extraction Using Iterative L0 Smoothing and Line Enhancing

Abstract

In this paper, our goal is salient building outline enhancement and extraction from images taken from consumer cameras using L 0 smoothing. We address weak outlines and oversmoothing problem. Weak outlines are often undetected by edge extractors or easily smoothed out. We propose an iterative method, including the smoothing cell and sharpening cell. In the smoothing cell, we iteratively enlarge the smoothing level of the L 0 smoothing. In the sharpening cell, we use Hough Transform to extract lines, based on the assumption that salient outlines for buildings are usually straight, and enhance those extracted lines. Our goal is to enhance line structures and do the L 0 smoothing simultaneously. Also, we propose to create building masks from semantic segmentation using an encoder-decoder network. The masks filter out irrelevant edges. We also provide an evaluation dataset on this task.