Building extraction from VHR remote sensing imagery by combining an improved deep convolutional encoder-decoder architecture and historical land use vector map

Building extraction has attracted considerable attention in the field of remote sensing image analysis. Fully convolutional network modelling is a recently developed technique that is capable of significantly enhancing building extraction accuracy. It is a prominent branch of deep learning and uses advanced state-of-the-art techniques, especially with regard to building segmentation. In this paper, we present an enhanced deep convolutional encoder-decoder (DCED) network by incorporating historical land use vector maps (HVMs) customized for building extraction. The approach combines enhanced DCED architecture with multi-scale image pyramid for pixel-wise building segmentation. The improved DCED network, together with symmetrical dense-shortcut connection structures, is employed to establish the encoders for automatic extraction of building features. The feature maps from early layers were fused with more discriminative feature maps from the deeper layers through ‘Res path’ skip connections for superior building extraction accuracy. To further reduce the occurrence of falsely segmented buildings, and to sharpen the buildings’ boundaries, the new temporal testing image is segmented under the constraints of an HVM. A majority voting strategy is employed to ensure the homogeneity of the building objects as the post-processing method. Experimental results indicate that the proposed approach exhibits competitive quantitative and qualitative performance, effectively alleviating the salt-and-pepper phenomenon and block effects, and retaining the edge structures of buildings. Compared with other state-of-the-art methods, our method demonstrably achieves the optimal final accuracies.