Abstract: Building heights are important for urban landscape planning,city habitat and eco-environmental assessment.In order to solve the problem of low accuracy in the study of extracting building height by using remote sensing images and the problem of excessive human intervention,this paper uses GF-2 satellite images to realize the automatic extraction of building shadows by calculating EMSI,NDVI and land surface reflectance.And then it calculates the height of the building based on the spatial geometric relationship.Finally,the results of the study are field tested.Experimental results show that using EMSI,NDVI and land surface reflectance can effectively extract the shadow of the building,and the mean accuracy of the estimations reach 95.40%,which proves the high feasibility of GF-2 images in estimating building heights.

Key words: building heights, morphology, spectrum, shadow extraction, GF-2 satellite