B-FGC-Net: A Building Extraction Network from High Resolution Remote Sensing Imagery

Abstract

Deep learning (DL) shows remarkable performance in extracting buildings from high resolution remote sensing images. However, how to improve the performance of DL based methods, especially the perception of spatial information, is worth further study. For this purpose, we proposed a building extraction network with feature highlighting, global awareness, and cross level information fusion (B-FGC-Net). The residual learning and spatial attention unit are introduced in the encoder of the B-FGC-Net, which simplifies the training of deep convolutional neural networks and highlights the spatial information representation of features. The global feature information awareness module is added to capture multiscale contextual information and integrate the global semantic information. The cross level feature recalibration module is used to bridge the semantic gap between low and high level features to complete the effective fusion of cross level information. The performance of the proposed method was tested on two public building datasets and compared with classical methods, such as UNet, LinkNet, and SegNet. Experimental results demonstrate that B-FGC-Net exhibits improved profitability of accurate extraction and information integration for both small and large scale buildings. The IoU scores of B-FGC-Net on WHU and INRIA Building datasets are 90.04% and 79.31%, respectively. B-FGC-Net is an effective and recommended method for extracting buildings from high resolution remote sensing images.