Multiscale U-Shaped CNN Building Instance Extraction Framework With Edge Constraint for High-Spatial-Resolution Remote Sensing Imagery

Building extraction based on high-resolution remote sensing imagery has been widely used in automatic surveying and mapping. However, few methods have been developed for building instance extraction, i.e., extracting each building’s footprint separately, which is required in a number of applications, such as the smallest unit of a cadastral database. In building instance extraction, there are two challenges: 1) buildings with various scales exist in the imagery and 2) precise building footprints are difficult to extract due to the blurry boundaries. In this article, to solve these problems, a multiscale U-shaped convolutional neural network building instance extraction framework with edge constraint (EMU-CNN) for high-spatial-resolution remote sensing imagery is proposed. The proposed framework consists of three components: 1) a multiscale fusion U-shaped network (MFUN); 2) a region proposal network (RPN); and 3) an edge-constrained multitask network (ECMN). First, in the proposed method, the MFUN includes three parallel branches to learn multiple building features with different scales. The RPN then detects the positions of the building instances, even for buildings that are connected with each other. Moreover, according to the instance positions, the ECMN is proposed to extract a precise mask and suppress overfitting. The experiments conducted on a self-annotated data set and two public data sets (the ISPRS Vaihingen semantic labeling contest data set and the WHU aerial image data set) show that the EMU-CNN method can achieve excellent performance and shows great robustness at different scales.