A Co-learning Method to Utilize Optical Images and Photogrammetric Point Clouds for Building Extraction

Abstract

Although deep learning techniques have brought unprecedented accuracy to automatic building extraction, several main issues still constitute an obstacle to effective and practical applications. The industry is eager for higher accuracy and more flexible data usage. In this paper, we present a co-learning framework applicable to building extraction from optical images and photogrammetric point clouds, which can take the advantage of 2D/3D multimodality data. Instead of direct information fusion, our co-learning framework adaptively exploits knowledge from another modality during the training phase with a soft connection, via a predefined loss function. Compared to conventional data fusion, this method is more flexible, as it is not mandatory to provide multimodality data in the test phase. We propose two types of co-learning: a standard version and an enhanced version, depending on whether unlabeled training data are employed. Experimental results from two data sets show that the methods we present can enhance the performance of both image and point cloud networks in few-shot tasks, as well as image networks when applying fully labeled training data sets.