Fully Convolutional Networks for Multisource Building Extraction From an Open Aerial and Satellite Imagery Data Set

The application of the convolutional neural network has shown to greatly improve the accuracy of building extraction from remote sensing imagery. In this paper, we created and made open a high-quality multisource data set for building detection, evaluated the accuracy obtained in most recent studies on the data set, demonstrated the use of our data set, and proposed a Siamese fully convolutional network model that obtained better segmentation accuracy. The building data set that we created contains not only aerial images but also satellite images covering 1000 km ² with both raster labels and vector maps. The accuracy of applying the same methodology to our aerial data set outperformed several other open building data sets. On the aerial data set, we gave a thorough evaluation and comparison of most recent deep learning-based methods, and proposed a Siamese U-Net with shared weights in two branches, and original images and their down-sampled counterparts as inputs, which significantly improves the segmentation accuracy, especially for large buildings. For multisource building extraction, the generalization ability is further evaluated and extended by applying a radiometric augmentation strategy to transfer pretrained models on the aerial data set to the satellite data set. The designed experiments indicate our data set is accurate and can serve multiple purposes including building instance segmentation and change detection; our result shows the Siamese U-Net outperforms current building extraction methods and could provide valuable reference.