Abstract: A residential area texture description based on the 3 ×3 region grey deviations is designed, and the Gauss blur is applied to make the residential area in the texture feature image possessing accordant grey value and limited contrast relative to the background area so as to obtain self-adaptive threshold for image segmentation.And a skeleton processing is proposed to eliminate the road from the residential area.The experiment results show that this technique is very simple and effective to the semi-automatic extraction of the residential areas and can meet the precision requirement of the mapping and surveying with satellite images.