A Multi-Feature Fusion-Based Two-Stage Method for Airport Crater Extraction from Remote Sensing Images

The accurate extraction of damage information around airport runways is crucial for the rapid development of subsequent damage effect assessment work and the timely formulation of the ensuing operational plan. However, the presence of dark interference areas such as trees and shadows in the background, as well as the increased irregularity at the edge of the crater due to the proximity to the crater, pose challenges to the accurate extraction of the crater area in high entropy images. In this paper, we present a multi-feature fusion-based two-stage method for airport crater extraction from remote sensing images. In stage I, we designed an edge arc segment grouping and matching strategy based on the shape characteristics of craters for preliminary detection. In stage II, we established a crater model based on the regional distribution characteristics of craters and used the marked point processing method for crater detection. In addition, during the step of calculating the magnitude of the edge gradient, we proposed a near-region search strategy, which enhanced the ability of the proposed method to accurately extract craters with irregular shapes. In the test images, the proposed method accurately extracts craters located around and within the runways. Among them, the average recall R and precision P of the proposed method for extracting all craters around the airport runways reached 89% and 87%, respectively, and the average recall R and precision P of the proposed method for extracting craters inside the runways reached 94% and 92%, respectively. Meanwhile, the results of comparative tests showed that our method outperformed other representative algorithms in terms of both crater extraction recall and extraction precision.