Building Dataset Research Articles

From lines to Polygons: Polygonal building contour extraction from High-Resolution remote sensing imagery

Automated extraction of polygonal building contours from high-resolution remote sensing images is important for various applications. However, it remains a difficult task to achieve automated extraction of polygonal buildings at the level of human delineation due to diverse building structures and imperfect image conditions. In this paper, we propose Line2Poly, an end-to-end approach that uses feature lines as geometric primitives to achieve polygonal building extraction by recovering topological relationships among these lines within an individual building. To extract building feature lines with precision, we adopt a two-stage strategy that combines Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and transformer architectures. A CNN-based module extracts preliminary feature lines, which serve as positional priors for initializing positional queries in the subsequent transformer-based module. For polygonal building contour reconstruction, we devise a learnable polygon topology reconstruction module that predicts adjacency relationships among discrete lines, and integrates lines into building polygons. The resultant building polygons, based on feature lines, exhibit inherent regularity that aligns with manual labeling standards. Extensive experiments on the Vectorizing World Buildings dataset, the WHU aerial building dataset and the WHU-Mix (vector) dataset validate Line2Poly’s impressive performance in building feature line extraction and instance-level building detection. Moreover, Line2Poly’s predictions exhibit the highest level of concurrence with manual delineations, with over 83% agreement on the WHU aerial building test set and 68.7/59.7% on the WHU-Mix (vector) test set I and II, respectively.

A benchmark GaoFen-7 dataset for building extraction from satellite images

Accurate building extraction is crucial for urban understanding, but it often requires a substantial number of building samples. While some building datasets are available for model training, there remains a lack of high-quality building datasets covering urban and rural areas in China. To fill this gap, this study creates a high-resolution GaoFen-7 (GF-7) Building dataset utilizing the Chinese GF-7 imagery from six Chinese cities. The dataset comprises 5,175 pairs of 512 × 512 image tiles, covering 573.17 km2. It contains 170,015 buildings, with 84.8% of the buildings in urban areas and 15.2% in rural areas. The usability of the GF-7 Building dataset has been proved with seven convolutional neural networks, all achieving an overall accuracy (OA) exceeding 93%. Experiments have shown that the GF-7 building dataset can be used for building extraction in urban and rural scenarios. The proposed dataset boasts high quality and high diversity. It supplements existing building datasets and will contribute to promoting new algorithms for building extraction, as well as facilitating intelligent building interpretation in China.

A Deep Learning Method for Building Extraction from Remote Sensing Images by Fuzing Local and Global Features

As important disaster-bearing bodies, buildings are the focus of attention in seismic disaster risk assessment and emergency rescue. It is of great practical significance to extract buildings quickly and accurately with complex textures and variable scales and shapes from high-resolution remote sensing images. We proposed an improved TransUnet model based on multiscale grouped convolution and attention named MATUnet to retain more local detail features and enhance the representation ability of global features, while reducing the network parameters. We designed the multiscale grouped convolutional feature extraction module with attention (GAM) to enhance the representation of detailed features. The convolutional positional encoding module (PEG) was added to redetermine the number of transformer, it solved the problem of local feature information loss and the difficulty of convergence of the network. The channel attention module (CAM) of the decoder enhanced the salient information of the features and solved the problem of information redundancy after feature fusion. We experimented through MATUnet on the WHU building dataset and Massachusetts dataset. MATUnet achieved the best IOU results of 92.14% and 83.22%, respectively, and achieved better than the other generalized and state-of-the-art networks under the same conditions. We also have achieved good segmentation results on the GF2 Xichang building dataset.

A Building Extraction Method for High-Resolution Remote Sensing Images with Multiple Attentions and Parallel Encoders Combining Enhanced Spectral Information

Accurately extracting pixel-level buildings from high-resolution remote sensing images is significant for various geographical information applications. Influenced by different natural, cultural, and social development levels, buildings may vary in shape and distribution, making it difficult for the network to maintain a stable segmentation effect of buildings in different areas of the image. In addition, the complex spectra of features in remote sensing images can affect the extracted details of multi-scale buildings in different ways. To this end, this study selects parts of Xi’an City, Shaanxi Province, China, as the study area. A parallel encoded building extraction network (MARS-Net) incorporating multiple attention mechanisms is proposed. MARS-Net builds its parallel encoder through DCNN and transformer to take advantage of their extraction of local and global features. According to the different depth positions of the network, coordinate attention (CA) and convolutional block attention module (CBAM) are introduced to bridge the encoder and decoder to retain richer spatial and semantic information during the encoding process, and adding the dense atrous spatial pyramid pooling (DenseASPP) captures multi-scale contextual information during the upsampling of the layers of the decoder. In addition, a spectral information enhancement module (SIEM) is designed in this study. SIEM further enhances building segmentation by blending and enhancing multi-band building information with relationships between bands. The experimental results show that MARS-Net performs better extraction results and obtains more effective enhancement after adding SIEM. The IoU on the self-built Xi’an and WHU building datasets are 87.53% and 89.62%, respectively, while the respective F1 scores are 93.34% and 94.52%.

Dual Hybrid Attention Mechanism-Based U-Net for Building Segmentation in Remote Sensing Images

High-resolution remote sensing images (HRRSI) have important theoretical and practical value in urban planning. However, current segmentation methods often struggle with issues like blurred edges and loss of detailed information due to the intricate backgrounds and rich semantics in high-resolution remote sensing images. To tackle these challenges, this paper proposes an end-to-end attention-based Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) called Double Hybrid Attention U-Net (DHAU-Net). We designed a new Double Hybrid Attention structure consisting of dual-parallel hybrid attention modules to replace the skip connections in U-Net, which can eliminate redundant information interference and enhances the collection and utilization of important shallow features. Comprehensive experiments on the Massachusetts remote sensing building dataset and the Inria aerial image labeling dataset demonstrate that our proposed method achieves effective pixel-level building segmentation in urban remote sensing images by eliminating redundant information interference and making full use of shallow features, and improves the segmentation performance without significant time costs (approximately 15%). The evaluation metrics reveal significant results, with an accuracy rate of 0.9808, precision reaching 0.9300, an F1 score of 0.9112, a mean intersection over union (mIoU) of 0.9088, and a recall rate of 0.8932.

A shape-aware enhancement Vision Transformer for building extraction from remote sensing imagery

ABSTRACT Convolutional neural networks (CNN) have been developed for several years in the field of extracting buildings from remote sensing images. Vision Transformer (ViT) has recently demonstrated superior performance over CNN, thanks to its ability to model long-range dependencies through self-attention mechanisms. However, most existing ViT models lack shape information enhancement for the building objects, resulting in insufficient fine-grained segmentation. To address this limitation, we construct an efficient dual-path ViT framework for building segmentation, termed shape-aware enhancement Vision Transformer (SAEViT). Our approach incorporates shape-aware enhancement module (SAEM) that perceives and enhances the shape features of buildings using multi-shapes of convolutional kernels. We also introduce multi-pooling channel attention (MPCA) to exploit channel-wise information without squeezing the channel dimension. Furthermore, we propose a progressive aggregation upsampling model (PAUM) in the decoder to aggregate multilevel features using a progressive upsampling methodology, coupled with the utilization of the soft-pool algorithm operating on the channel axis. We evaluate our model on three public building datasets. The experimental results show that SAEViT obtains a significant improvement on various datasets, confirming its efficacy. Compared with several state-of-the-art models, SAEViT achieves a comprehensive transcendence in overall performance.

EMAFF-Net: an enhanced multi-scale attentive feature fusion network for building extraction from VHR remote sensing images

ABSTRACT Automated building extraction is imperative for several geospatial applications such as monitoring disaster-affected buildings and urban planning. Existing deep learning (DL)-based building extraction methods fail to capture high-level semantic features due to the complex nature and diverse appearance of visually similar structures. To address this issue, in this letter, we propose an enhanced multi-scale attentive feature fusion network (EMAFF-Net) for building extraction from remote sensing (RS) images. EMAFF-Net is an end-to-end DL architecture based on U-Net that includes: i) an encoder; ii) an enhanced multi-scale feature fusion (EMFF) module; iii) a refined multi-scale convolutional block attention (RM-CBAM) module and iv) a decoder with refinement layers. To extract multi-scale contextual information, we incorporate an RM-CBAM module into the lateral connections of encoder-decoder layers of EMAFF-Net. Further, a novel EMFF module is integrated to obtain fine-grained features from the lowest encoder layer with minimal trainable parameters required. We evaluate the performance of the proposed network on two benchmark datasets: Massachusetts (MAS) and WHU building datasets. The experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms the existing reference methods showcasing its potential in practical applications.

Nearly Zero-Energy Building Load Forecasts through the Competition of Four Machine Learning Techniques

Heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems account for approximately 50% of the total energy consumption in buildings. Advanced control and optimal operation, seen as key technologies in reducing the energy consumption of HVAC systems, indispensably rely on an accurate prediction of the building’s heating/cooling load. Therefore, the goal of this research is to develop a model capable of making such accurate predictions. To streamline the process, this study employs sensitivity and correlation analysis for feature selection, thereby eliminating redundant parameters, and addressing distortion problems caused by multicollinearity among input parameters. Four model identification methods including multivariate polynomial regression (MPR), support vector regression (SVR), multilayer perceptron (MLP), and extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) are implemented in parallel to extract value from diverse building datasets. These models are trained and selected autonomously based on statistical performance criteria. The prediction models were deployed in a nearly zero-energy office building, and the impacts of feature selection, training set size, and real-world uncertainty factors were analyzed and compared. The results showed that feature selection considerably improved prediction accuracy while reducing model dimensionality. The research also recognized that prediction accuracy during model deployment can be influenced significantly by factors like personnel mobility during holidays and weather forecast uncertainties. Additionally, for nearly zero-energy buildings, the thermal inertia of the building itself can considerably impact prediction accuracy in certain scenarios.

A multi-step electricity prediction model for residential buildings based on ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition technique

Residential electricity demand is increasing rapidly, constituting about a quarter of total energy consumption. Electricity demand prediction is one of the sustainable solutions to improve energy efficiency in real-world scenarios. The non-linear and non-stationary consumption patterns in residential buildings make electricity prediction more challenging. This paper proposes a multi-step prediction approach that first conducts cluster analysis to identify seasonal consumption patterns. Secondly, an improved Complete Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition with Adaptive Noise (CEEMDAN) method and autoencoder model has been deployed to remove irregular patterns, noise, and redundancy from electricity load time series. Finally, the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model has been trained to predict electricity consumption by considering historical, seasonal, and temporal data dependencies. Further, experimental analysis has been conducted on real-time electricity consumption datasets of residential buildings. The comparative results reveal that the proposed multi-step model outperformed the existing state-of-the-art RF-LSTM-based prediction model and attained higher accuracy.

Auditing Geospatial Datasets for Biases: Using Global Building Datasets for Disaster Risk Management

Auditing Geospatial Datasets for Biases: Using Global Building Datasets for Disaster Risk Management

SDSNet: Building Extraction in High-Resolution Remote Sensing Images Using a Deep Convolutional Network with Cross-Layer Feature Information Interaction Filtering

Building extraction refers to the automatic identification and separation of buildings from the background in remote sensing images. It plays a significant role in urban planning, land management, and disaster monitoring. Deep-learning methods have shown advantages in building extraction, but they still face challenges such as variations in building types, object occlusions, and complex backgrounds. To address these issues, SDSNet, a deep convolutional network that incorporates global multi-scale feature extraction and cross-level feature fusion, is proposed. SDSNet consists of three modules: semantic information extraction (SIE), multi-level merge (MLM), and semantic information fusion (SIF). The SIE module extracts contextual information and improves recognition of multi-scale buildings. The MLM module filters irrelevant details guided by high-level semantic information, aiding in the restoration of edge details for buildings. The SIF module combines filtered detail information with extracted semantic information for refined building extraction. A series of experiments conducted on two distinct public datasets for building extraction consistently demonstrate that SDSNet outperforms the state-of-the-art deep-learning models for building extraction tasks. On the WHU building dataset, the overall accuracy (OA) and intersection over union (IoU) achieved impressive scores of 98.86% and 90.17%, respectively. Meanwhile, on the Massachusetts dataset, SDSNet achieved OA and IoU scores of 94.05% and 71.6%, respectively. SDSNet exhibits a unique advantage in recovering fine details along building edges, enabling automated and intelligent building extraction. This capability effectively supports urban planning, resource management, and disaster monitoring.

Enhancing anomaly detection in electrical consumption profiles through computational intelligence

The advancement of society and the raising of people's standards of living depend heavily on electricity in today's world. The "zero energy buildings" idea, which recommends that buildings become self-sufficient in renewable energy to prevent the emission of CO2 into the environment, is now one of the most significant initiatives connected to building energy efficiency. This article describes a computational intelligence method to detect anomalous variations in a facility's energy use and infer a potential cause of such changes. The model is built using five sets of historical power consumption data from three buildings spread across four nations (Ecuador, Spain, France, and Canada), which are categorized based on the anomaly type each piece of data represents. Through a statistical study of the confidence interval, the proposed method, first determines the consumption patterns for each day of the week in each of the building's data sets. After normalizing the day to be studied toward its "Z" value, it is then cataloged using a machine learning model. The proposed method is evaluated in comparison to a purely statistical method called SAEEC methodology and it is discovered that the proposed method offers a relative improvement in accuracy, false positive rate (FPR), and false negative rate (FNR) of 12.41%, 42, 36%, and 42.45%, respectively, for the detection of atypical values in electrical energy consumption.

Enhancing building segmentation by deep multiview classification for advancing sustainable urban development

Accurate building segmentation plays a crucial role in a wide range of applications such as urban planning, monitoring, and mapping. Different deep learning models were employed for building segmentation. However, these models analyze images from a single view. Given the limitations of single-view building segmentation models, our research aims to enhance accuracy by proposing a novel multi-view U-Net deep model for accurate building segmentation that incorporates multiple views of the images. We employ two pre-trained convolutional neural network architectures, MobileNetV2 and ResNet50, to extract features representing two different views of our images. By fusing these features, our proposed method effectively captures complementary information, leading to enhanced segmentation accuracy. To further improve the model’s performance, we incorporate skip connections and up-convolutional layers to ensure fine-grained feature propagation. Our experimental results on a large building dataset demonstrate a significant improvement in segmentation accuracy 91% compared to state-of-the-art methods, highlighting the effectiveness of our multiview fusion approach. The experimental results enhance the benefits of creating different views by adopting the novel concept proposed in this paper. This research has the potential to redefine the landscape of building segmentation in applications such as urban planning and mapping. We also conducted a test on a large study area (city scale of Belval–Luxembourg). This demonstrates the capabilities of our method and its efficiency in segmenting satellite images from a large extent area and reinforces its potential for real-world applications.

Vectorizing planar roof structure from very high resolution remote sensing images using transformers

ABSTRACT Accurately predicting the geometric structure of a building's roof as a vectorized representation from a raster image is a challenging task in building reconstruction. In this paper, we propose an efficient and precise parsing method called Roof-Former, based on a vision Transformer. Our method involves three steps: (1) Image encoder and edge node initialization, (2) Image feature fusion with an enhanced segmentation refinement branch, and (3) Edge filtering and structural reasoning. Our method outperforms previous works on the vectorizing world building dataset and the Enschede dataset, with vertex and edge heat map F1-scores increasing from 87.1 % , 76.2 % to 89.1 % , 78.1 % , and from 69.7 % , 68.8 % to 71.2 % , 69.5 % , respectively. Furthermore, our method demonstrates superior performance compared to the current state-of-the-art based on qualitative evaluations, indicating its effectiveness in extracting global image information while maintaining the consistency and topological validity of the roof structure.

Advancing Rural Building Extraction via Diverse Dataset Construction and Model Innovation with Attention and Context Learning

Rural building automatic extraction technology is of great significance for rural planning and disaster assessment; however, existing methods face the dilemma of scarce sample data and large regional differences in rural buildings. To solve this problem, this study constructed an image dataset of typical Chinese rural buildings, including nine typical geographical regions, such as the Northeast and North China Plains. Additionally, an improved remote sensing image rural building extraction network called AGSC-Net was designed. Based on an encoder–decoder structure, the model integrates multiple attention gate (AG) modules and a context collaboration network (CC-Net). The AG modules realize focused expression of building-related features through feature selection. The CC-Net module models the global dependency between different building instances, providing complementary localization and scale information to the decoder. By embedding AG and CC-Net modules between the encoder and decoder, the model can capture multiscale semantic information on building features. Experiments show that, compared with other models, AGSC-Net achieved the best quantitative metrics on two rural building datasets, verifying the accuracy of the extraction results. This study provides an effective example for automatic extraction in complex rural scenes and lays the foundation for related monitoring and planning applications.

MFFNet: A Building Extraction Network for Multi-Source High-Resolution Remote Sensing Data

The use of deep learning methods to extract buildings from remote sensing images is a key contemporary research focus, and traditional deep convolutional networks continue to exhibit limitations in this regard. This study introduces a novel multi-feature fusion network (MFFNet), with the aim of enhancing the accuracy of building extraction from high-resolution remote sensing images of various sources. MFFNet improves feature capture for building targets by integrating deep semantic information from various attention mechanisms with multi-scale spatial information from a spatial pyramid module, significantly enhancing the results of building extraction. The performance of MFFNet was tested on three datasets: the self-constructed Jilin-1 building dataset, the Massachusetts building dataset, and the WHU building dataset. Notably, experimental results from the Jilin-1 building dataset demonstrated that MFFNet achieved an average intersection over union (MIoU) of 89.69%, an accuracy of 97.05%, a recall rate of 94.25%, a precision of 94.66%, and an F1 score of 94.82%. Comparisons with the other two public datasets also showed MFFNet’s significant advantages over traditional deep convolutional networks. These results confirm the superiority of MFFNet in extracting buildings from different high-resolution remote sensing data compared to other network models.

A Physics-Informed Neural Network Approach for Surrogating a Numerical Simulation of Fractured Horizontal Well Production Prediction

With the popularity of deep learning (DL), more and more studies are focusing on replacing time-consuming numerical simulations with efficient surrogate models to predict the production of multi-stage fractured horizontal wells. Previous studies on constructing surrogate models for the prediction of the production of fractured horizontal wells often relied on directly applying existing deep learning architectures without incorporating physical constraints into the model. When dealing with the large number of variables necessary for characterizing the properties of fractures, the input variables of proxy models are often oversimplified; meanwhile, lots of physical information is lost. Consequently, predictions are sometimes physically inconsistent with the underlying principles of the domain. In this study, by modifying the traditional Seq2Seq (LSTM–LSTM) deep learning architecture, a physics-informed encoder–decoder (PIED) architecture was developed to surrogate the numerical simulation codes for predicting the production of horizontal wells with unequal-length intersecting hydraulic fractures on a 2D plane. The encoder is a LSTM network, and the decoder consists of LSTM and fully connected layers. The attention algorithm is also applied in the Seq2Seq architecture. The PIED model’s encoder is capable of extracting the physical information related to fractures. And the attention module effectively passes on the most relevant physical information related to production to the decoder during the training process. By modifying Seq2Seq architecture, the decoder of the PIED incorporates the intermediate input, which is the constant production time, along with the extracted physical information to predict production values. The PIED model excels in extracting sufficient physical information from high-dimensional inputs while ensuring the integrity of the production time information. By considering the physical constraints, the model predicts production values with improved accuracy and generalization capabilities. In addition, a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) which is broadly used as a proxy model; a regular Seq2Seq model (LSTM–Attention–LSTM); and the PIED were compared via a case study, and their MAE values were shown to be 241.76, 184.07, 168.81, respectively. Therefore, the proposed model has higher accuracy and better generalization ability. In the case study, a comparative experiment was conducted by comparing LSTM–MLP (with an MAE of 221.50) and LSTM–LSTM to demonstrate that using LSTM as the decoder structure is better for predicting production series. Moreover, in the task of predicting production sequences, LSTM outperforms MLP. The Seq2Seq architecture demonstrated excellent performance in this problem, and it achieved a 48.4% reduction in MSE compared to MLP. Meanwhile, the time cost for build datasets was considered, and the proposed model was found to be capable of training in a small dataset (e.g., in the case study, 3 days were used to generate 450 samples for training.); thus, the proposed model has a certain degree of practicality.

A Novel Building Extraction Network via Multi-Scale Foreground Modeling and Gated Boundary Refinement

Deep learning-based methods for building extraction from remote sensing images have been widely applied in fields such as land management and urban planning. However, extracting buildings from remote sensing images commonly faces challenges due to specific shooting angles. First, there exists a foreground–background imbalance issue, and the model excessively learns features unrelated to buildings, resulting in performance degradation and propagative interference. Second, buildings have complex boundary information, while conventional network architectures fail to capture fine boundaries. In this paper, we designed a multi-task U-shaped network (BFL-Net) to solve these problems. This network enhances the expression of the foreground and boundary features in the prediction results through foreground learning and boundary refinement, respectively. Specifically, the Foreground Mining Module (FMM) utilizes the relationship between buildings and multi-scale scene spaces to explicitly model, extract, and learn foreground features, which can enhance foreground and related contextual features. The Dense Dilated Convolutional Residual Block (DDCResBlock) and the Dual Gate Boundary Refinement Module (DGBRM) individually process the diverted regular stream and boundary stream. The former can effectively expand the receptive field, and the latter utilizes spatial and channel gates to activate boundary features in low-level feature maps, helping the network refine boundaries. The predictions of the network for the building, foreground, and boundary are respectively supervised by ground truth. The experimental results on the WHU Building Aerial Imagery and Massachusetts Buildings Datasets show that the IoU scores of BFL-Net are 91.37% and 74.50%, respectively, surpassing state-of-the-art models.

BCD-Net: building change detection based on fully scale connected U-Net and subpixel convolution

ABSTRACTIn recent decades, building change detection (BCD) algorithms have made significant progress by introducing deep learning (DL) for pixel-based change detection (CD). However, they still suffer the problem of low accuracy owing to insufficient feature extraction that is not discriminative enough. Hence, this results in poor semantic segmentation, including irrelevant change information and inconsistent boundaries. To tackle these problems, we present a novel DL-based method known as building change detection (BCD-Net) in an end-to-end manner. Our approach not only deals with the above-mentioned challenges but also significantly increases the level of accuracy. Moreover, our proposed method is inspired by full-scale U-Net3+ that uses an encoder and decoder for semantic segmentation. We modified the U-Net3+ by adding subpixel convolution layers instead of upsampling layers. BCD-Net is applied in three main parts: (1) data preparation, (2) model training/optimization of model parameters, and (3) building change detection based on tuned models. To evaluate the performance of BCD-Net, the benchmark unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), and satellite imagery were employed. The BCD-Net obtained an accuracy of 98.80% accuracy with the known WHU building dataset and 94.48% on the EGY-BCD dataset. The obtained results demonstrated that the proposed BCD-Net outperformed the rest of the techniques and achieved competitive accuracy, a low rate of miss-detection, and a false alarm rate.

Aerial image semantic segmentation based on 3D fits a small dataset of 1D

<p>Time restrictions and lack of precision demand that the initial technique be abandoned. Even though the remaining datasets had fewer identified classes than initially planned for the study, the labels were more accurate. Because of the need for additional data, a single network cannot categorize all the essential elements in a picture, including bodies of water, roads, trees, buildings, and crops. However, the final network gains some invariance in detecting these classes with environmental changes due to the different geographic positions of roads and buildings discovered in the final datasets, which could be valuable in future navigation research. At the moment, binary classifications of a single class are the only datasets that can be used for the semantic segmentation of aerial images. Even though some pictures have more than one classification, images of roads and buildings were only found in a significant number of samples. Then, the building datasets were pooled to produce a larger dataset and for the constructed models to gain some invariance on image location. Because of the massive disparity in sample size, road datasets needed to be integrated.</p>