Automatic Image Processing for Detecting Courtyards Geo-Locations of Urban Fabric of Mosul Old City

In the post-conflict period, cities are often exposed to significant damage, requiring exceptional efforts to rebuild the damaged urban fabric. In many cases, with the lack of their rebuilding proper documents, it has become necessary to use a set of techniques and ‎mechanisms that assist in re-imagining the worthy parts of the fabric with a view to their reconstruction. Aerial ‎photography is an essential element in documenting any urban fabric components. In 2017, huge destruction occurred in many areas of Mosul Old City (MOC). Some districts were ‎massively destructed leading to the vanishing of their urban fabric features. MOC is characterized by its compact urban fabric and the presence of ‎internal courtyards in its buildings, which serve as an outlet and an element for lighting and ‎ventilation, in addition to its aesthetic, social, and functional tasks. This paper aims to use historic aerial photographs in re-locating the positions of the building's courtyards in a part of ‎ MOC urban fabric, as one of the first steps of a comprehensive plan to represent it in the ‎absence of the required documents and surveys. The paper suggested methodology concludes a set of successive ‎phases of automatic image processing (AIP) to reach the desired results, through which the positions of the courtyards can be determined in a network form whose geo-locations can be determined easily.