Abstract
Automatic building extraction using a single data type, either 2D remotely-sensed images or light detection and ranging 3D point clouds, remains insufficient to accurately delineate building outlines for automatic mapping, despite active research in this area and the significant progress which has been achieved in the past decade. This paper presents an effective approach to extracting buildings from Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) images through the incorporation of superpixel segmentation and semantic recognition. A framework for building extraction is constructed by jointly using an improved Simple Linear Iterative Clustering (SLIC) algorithm and Multiscale Siamese Convolutional Networks (MSCNs). The SLIC algorithm, improved by additionally imposing a digital surface model for superpixel segmentation, namely 6D-SLIC, is suited for building boundary detection under building and image backgrounds with similar radiometric signatures. The proposed MSCNs, including a feature learning network and a binary decision network, are used to automatically learn a multiscale hierarchical feature representation and detect building objects under various complex backgrounds. In addition, a gamma-transform green leaf index is proposed to truncate vegetation superpixels for further processing to improve the robustness and efficiency of building detection, the Douglas–Peucker algorithm and iterative optimization are used to eliminate jagged details generated from small structures as a result of superpixel segmentation. In the experiments, the UAV datasets, including many buildings in urban and rural areas with irregular shapes and different heights and that are obscured by trees, are collected to evaluate the proposed method. The experimental results based on the qualitative and quantitative measures confirm the effectiveness and high accuracy of the proposed framework relative to the digitized results. The proposed framework performs better than state-of-the-art building extraction methods, given its higher values of recall, precision, and intersection over Union (IoU).
Highlights
Building extraction based on remote sensing data is an effective technique to automatically delineate building outlines; it has been widely studied for decades in the fields of photogrammetry and remote sensing, and is extensively used in various applications, including urban planning, cartographic mapping, and land use analysis [1,2]
The significant progress in sensors and operating platforms has enabled us to acquire remote sensing images and 3D point clouds from cameras or Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) equipped in various platforms (e.g., satellite, aerial, and Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) platforms); the methods based on images and point clouds are commonly used to extract buildings [3,4,5]
RGB-based Multidimensional Feature Vector (MFV) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifiers were integrated by Dai et al [5] to eliminate vegetation; in this method, buildings are extracted by using a certain height threshold (e.g., 2.5 m), and building outlines are regularized by jointly using a line-growing algorithm and a w-k-means clustering algorithm
Summary
Building extraction based on remote sensing data is an effective technique to automatically delineate building outlines; it has been widely studied for decades in the fields of photogrammetry and remote sensing, and is extensively used in various applications, including urban planning, cartographic mapping, and land use analysis [1,2]. RGB-based Multidimensional Feature Vector (MFV) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifiers were integrated by Dai et al [5] to eliminate vegetation; in this method, buildings are extracted by using a certain height threshold (e.g., 2.5 m), and building outlines are regularized by jointly using a line-growing algorithm and a w-k-means clustering algorithm This method is only useful for extracting buildings with linear and perpendicular edges and not applicable to extract buildings with irregular shapes. The main contribution of this study is to propose a method for building extraction that is suitable for UAV orthoimage and image-derived point clouds In this method, the improved SLIC algorithm for UAV image segmentation, which helps accurately delineate building boundaries under building and image backgrounds with similar radiometric signatures.
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