End-to-end semantic segmentation and boundary regularization of buildings from satellite imagery

Abstract

Building footprint generation is a vital task of satellite imagery interpretation. However, the segmentation masks of buildings obtained by existing semantic segmentation networks often have blurred boundaries and irregular shapes. In this research, we propose a new boundary regularization network for building footprint generation in satellite images. More specifically, we consider semantic segmentation and boundary regularization in an end-to-end generative adversarial network (GAN). The learned building footprints are regularized by the interplay between the generator and discriminator. By doing so, the straight boundaries and geometric details of the building could be preserved. Experiments are conducted on a collected dataset of Planetscope satellite imagery (spatial resolution: 4.77 m/pixel). Our approach is much superior to the state-of-the-art methods in both quantitative and qualitative results.