A Lightweight Building Extraction Approach for Contour Recovery in Complex Urban Environments

High-spatial-resolution urban buildings play a crucial role in urban planning, emergency response, and disaster management. However, challenges such as missing building contours due to occlusion problems (occlusion between buildings of different heights and buildings obscured by trees), uneven conto...

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Main Authors: Jiaxin He, Yong Cheng, Wei Wang, Zhoupeng Ren, Ce Zhang, Wenjie Zhang
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2024-02-01
Series:Remote Sensing
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/16/5/740
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author Jiaxin He
Yong Cheng
Wei Wang
Zhoupeng Ren
Ce Zhang
Wenjie Zhang
author_facet Jiaxin He
Yong Cheng
Wei Wang
Zhoupeng Ren
Ce Zhang
Wenjie Zhang
author_sort Jiaxin He
collection DOAJ
description High-spatial-resolution urban buildings play a crucial role in urban planning, emergency response, and disaster management. However, challenges such as missing building contours due to occlusion problems (occlusion between buildings of different heights and buildings obscured by trees), uneven contour extraction due to mixing of building edges with other feature elements (roads, vehicles, and trees), and slow training speed in high-resolution image data hinder efficient and accurate building extraction. To address these issues, we propose a semantic segmentation model composed of a lightweight backbone, coordinate attention module, and pooling fusion module, which achieves lightweight building extraction and adaptive recovery of spatial contours. Comparative experiments were conducted on datasets featuring typical urban building instances in China and the Mapchallenge dataset, comparing our method with several classical and mainstream semantic segmentation algorithms. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving excellent mean intersection over union (mIoU) and frames per second (FPS) scores on both datasets (China dataset: 85.11% and 110.67 FPS; Mapchallenge dataset: 90.27% and 117.68 FPS). Quantitative evaluations indicate that our model not only significantly improves computational speed but also ensures high accuracy in the extraction of urban buildings from high-resolution imagery. Specifically, on a typical urban building dataset from China, our model shows an accuracy improvement of 0.64% and a speed increase of 70.03 FPS compared to the baseline model. On the Mapchallenge dataset, our model achieves an accuracy improvement of 0.54% and a speed increase of 42.39 FPS compared to the baseline model. Our research indicates that lightweight networks show significant potential in urban building extraction tasks. In the future, the segmentation accuracy and prediction speed can be further balanced on the basis of adjusting the deep learning model or introducing remote sensing indices, which can be applied to research scenarios such as greenfield extraction or multi-class target extraction.
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spelling doaj.art-af14fe7142754de4add3a72ebf9d66af2024-03-12T16:53:51ZengMDPI AGRemote Sensing2072-42922024-02-0116574010.3390/rs16050740A Lightweight Building Extraction Approach for Contour Recovery in Complex Urban EnvironmentsJiaxin He0Yong Cheng1Wei Wang2Zhoupeng Ren3Ce Zhang4Wenjie Zhang5School of Automation, Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology, Nanjing 210044, ChinaSchool of Software, Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology, Nanjing 210044, ChinaSchool of Automation, Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology, Nanjing 210044, ChinaState Key Laboratory of Resources and Environmental Information System, Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, ChinaSchool of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, Bristol BS8 1SS, UKSchool of Geographical Sciences, Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology, Nanjing 210044, ChinaHigh-spatial-resolution urban buildings play a crucial role in urban planning, emergency response, and disaster management. However, challenges such as missing building contours due to occlusion problems (occlusion between buildings of different heights and buildings obscured by trees), uneven contour extraction due to mixing of building edges with other feature elements (roads, vehicles, and trees), and slow training speed in high-resolution image data hinder efficient and accurate building extraction. To address these issues, we propose a semantic segmentation model composed of a lightweight backbone, coordinate attention module, and pooling fusion module, which achieves lightweight building extraction and adaptive recovery of spatial contours. Comparative experiments were conducted on datasets featuring typical urban building instances in China and the Mapchallenge dataset, comparing our method with several classical and mainstream semantic segmentation algorithms. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving excellent mean intersection over union (mIoU) and frames per second (FPS) scores on both datasets (China dataset: 85.11% and 110.67 FPS; Mapchallenge dataset: 90.27% and 117.68 FPS). Quantitative evaluations indicate that our model not only significantly improves computational speed but also ensures high accuracy in the extraction of urban buildings from high-resolution imagery. Specifically, on a typical urban building dataset from China, our model shows an accuracy improvement of 0.64% and a speed increase of 70.03 FPS compared to the baseline model. On the Mapchallenge dataset, our model achieves an accuracy improvement of 0.54% and a speed increase of 42.39 FPS compared to the baseline model. Our research indicates that lightweight networks show significant potential in urban building extraction tasks. In the future, the segmentation accuracy and prediction speed can be further balanced on the basis of adjusting the deep learning model or introducing remote sensing indices, which can be applied to research scenarios such as greenfield extraction or multi-class target extraction.https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/16/5/740remote sensing imageslightweightcontext informationadaptive recoverybuilding extraction
spellingShingle Jiaxin He
Yong Cheng
Wei Wang
Zhoupeng Ren
Ce Zhang
Wenjie Zhang
A Lightweight Building Extraction Approach for Contour Recovery in Complex Urban Environments
Remote Sensing
remote sensing images
lightweight
context information
adaptive recovery
building extraction
title A Lightweight Building Extraction Approach for Contour Recovery in Complex Urban Environments
title_full A Lightweight Building Extraction Approach for Contour Recovery in Complex Urban Environments
title_fullStr A Lightweight Building Extraction Approach for Contour Recovery in Complex Urban Environments
title_full_unstemmed A Lightweight Building Extraction Approach for Contour Recovery in Complex Urban Environments
title_short A Lightweight Building Extraction Approach for Contour Recovery in Complex Urban Environments
title_sort lightweight building extraction approach for contour recovery in complex urban environments
topic remote sensing images
lightweight
context information
adaptive recovery
building extraction
url https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/16/5/740
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