Multiscale Building Extraction With Refined Attention Pyramid Networks

Automatic building extraction from high-resolution aerial and satellite images has many practical applications, such as urban planning and disaster management. However, the complex appearance and various scales of buildings in remote-sensing images bring a challenge for building extraction. In this study, we developed a novel multiscale building extraction method based on refined attention pyramid networks (RAPNets). We built an encoder-decoder structure, and combine atrous convolution, deformable convolution, attention mechanism, and pyramid pooling module to improve the performance of feature extraction in the encoding path. Moreover, the salient multiscale features were extracted by embedding the convolutional block attention module into the lateral connections. Finally, the refined feature pyramid structure was adopted in the decoding path to fuse the multiscale features to obtain the final extraction results. Experiments on two standard data sets (Inria aerial image labeling data set and xBD data set) show that our method achieves reliable results and outperforms the comparing methods.