Efficient Building Extraction for High Spatial Resolution Images Based on Dual Attention Network

Abstract

Building extraction with high spatial resolution images becomes an important research in the field of computer vision for urban-related applications. Due to the rich detailed information and complex texture features presented in high spatial resolution images, the distribution of buildings is non-proportional and their difference of scales is obvious. General methods often provide confusion results with other ground objects. In this paper, a building extraction framework based on deep residual neural network with a self-attention mechanism is proposed. This mechanism contains two parts: one is the spatial attention module, which is used to aggregate and relate the local and global features at each position (short and long distance context information) of buildings; the other is channel attention module, in which the representation of comprehensive features (includes color, texture, geometric and high-level semantic feature) are improved. The combination of the dual attention modules makes buildings can be extracted from the complex backgrounds. The effectiveness of our method is validated by the experiments counted on a wide range high spatial resolution image, i.e., Jilin-1 Gaofen 02A imagery. Compared with some state-of-the-art segmentation methods, i.e., DeepLab-v3+, PSPNet, and PSANet algorithms, the proposed dual attention network-based method achieved high accuracy and intersection-over-union for extraction performance and show finest recognition integrity of buildings.