AUTOMATED PROCESS FOR BUILDING MATERIAL DETECTION IN REMOTELY SENSED MEMORY

A system and method for automatically (without human intervention) identifying a material in an image that comprises a building material for buildings in the image. Building side polygons which may be used to identify building sides in off-nadir imagery are generated. Off-nadir, multispectral images, building footprint data and elevation data for a geographic area are taken as input. Building heights for buildings in the geographic area are determined by clipping the elevation data using the building footprint data and then calculating building heights. A candidate set of polygons representing visible side faces of each building in the images is created from the known building heights, and based on the viewpoint direction, using vector analysis. After culling occluded polygons and polygons too small for analysis, the polygons are associated with a building footprint. Building materials for each building having visible polygons can then be identified.