  Automatic extraction of buildings in remote sensing images is an important
but challenging task and finds many applications in different fields such as
urban planning, navigation and so on. This paper addresses the problem of
buildings extraction in very high-spatial-resolution (VHSR) remote sensing (RS)
images, whose spatial resolution is often up to half meters and provides rich
information about buildings. Based on the observation that buildings in VHSR-RS
images are always more distinguishable in geometry than in texture or spectral
domain, this paper proposes a geometric building index (GBI) for accurate
building extraction, by computing the geometric saliency from VHSR-RS images.
More precisely, given an image, the geometric saliency is derived from a
mid-level geometric representations based on meaningful junctions that can
locally describe geometrical structures of images. The resulting GBI is finally
measured by integrating the derived geometric saliency of buildings.
Experiments on three public and commonly used datasets demonstrate that the
proposed GBI achieves the state-of-the-art performance and shows impressive
generalization capability. Additionally, GBI preserves both the exact position
and accurate shape of single buildings compared to existing methods.
