Abstract: Based on the distribution of building shadows in optical remote sensing images, the relationship between building height and shadow distribution is derived. Based on this, the buildings height inversion method is established, and the height information inversion of the typical buildings in Beijing is realized. The results show that the height of the building is extracted using the full length of the shadow of the building in summer or the length of the visible part in the winter, 90.9% and 84.8% of building calculation errors are controlled within 5% of the height of the building. When extracting the height of residential areas or high-rise buildings, summer remote sensing images should be used as much as possible to reduce the shadow occlusion. When the height of the low building is extracted, it is better to use the shaded part of the winter image to perform the inversion calculation. In the absence of image parameters such as satellite orbit, use the height of the typical known building to reverse the relevant parameters, and it is feasible to use those parameters to estimate the height of other buildings in the same scene image, providing the possible of using the typical urban buildings to estimate the height of buildings.

Key words: building height, shadow extraction, remote sensing inversion, visual interpretation, feature line