Delineation of vacant building land using orthophoto and lidar data object classification

Exact data about the location and area of vacant building land have been a major issue in several Slovene municipalities. This article deals with automatic vacant building land delineation. The presented methodology is based on the object-based classification that derives the land cover layer from orthophoto and laser scanning data. With post-processing and data cleaning in GIS, we create the vacant building land layer. The methodology was tested in study areas in the Municipality of Trebnje. The results were compared to the vacant building land layer generated by visual interpretation (manual vectorisation) . We found that the presented methodology of automatic delineation of vacant buildings can speed up the processing and lower the cost of manual vectorisation and, in particular, data updating but we cannot completely replace manual work.