In the automatic interpretation of visible spectral remote sensing images (RSIs)

in order to reduce the time of extracting a specific interested object of man made building

it usually locates coarsely the area of man made buildings first. A remote sensing image has the typical feature that different ground forms have different spectrums: The frequency of building area is higher than that of other areas. Based this kind of difference

an algorithm for locating the building area of RSIs using wavelets transformation and mathematical morphology is proposed. First

wavelets transformation is applied on a RSI to transform different information of ground forms into different frequency bands. Then

the high frequency information is merged

and in the merged image

the area where the amplitude changes rapidly is regarded as a peak

while the area where the amplitude changes smoothly is regarded as a basin. Finally

the building area is extracted based on morphological reconstruction. The experiments show that the proposed algorithm is accurate and fast.