An Automated Framework for Estimating Building Height Changes Using Multi-Temporal Street View Imagery

Building height is an important indicator for describing the three-dimensional structure of cities. However, monitoring its changes is still difficult due to high labor costs, low efficiency, and the limited resolution and viewing angles of remote sensing images. This study proposes an automatic framework for estimating building height changes using multi-temporal street view images. First, buildings are detected by the YOLO-v5 model, and their contours are extracted through edge detection and hole filling. To reduce false detections, greenness and depth information are combined to filter out pseudo changes. Then, a neighboring region resampling strategy is used to select visually similar images for better alignment, which helps to reduce the influence of sampling errors. In addition, the framework applies cylindrical projection correction and introduces a triangulation-based method (HCAOT) for building height estimation. Experimental results show that the proposed framework achieves an accuracy of 85.11% in detecting real changes and 91.23% in identifying unchanged areas. For height estimation, the HCAOT method reaches an RMSE of 0.65 m and an NRMSE of 0.04, which performs better than several comparison methods. Overall, the proposed framework provides an efficient and reliable approach for dynamically updating 3D urban information and supporting spatial monitoring in smart cities.