Automatic Building Detection with Polygonizing and Attribute Extraction from High-Resolution Images

Abstract

Buildings can be introduced as a fundamental element for forming a city. Therefore, up-to-date building maps have become vital for many applications, including urban mapping and urban expansion analysis. With the development of deep learning, segmenting building footprints from high-resolution remote sensing imagery has become a subject of intense study. Here, a modified version of the U-Net architecture with a combination of pre- and post-processing techniques was developed to extract building footprints from high-resolution aerial imagery and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) imagery. Data pre-processing with the logarithmic correction image enhancing algorithm showed the most significant improvement in the building detection accuracy for aerial images; meanwhile, the CLAHE algorithm improved the most concerning UAV images. This study developed a post-processing technique using polygonizing and polygon smoothing called the Douglas–Peucker algorithm, which made the building output directly ready to use for different applications. The attribute information, land use data, and population count data were applied using two open datasets. In addition, the building area and perimeter of each building were calculated as geometric attributes.