Building extraction from remote sensing imagery: advanced squeeze-and-excitation residual network based methodology

Abstract

Extracting buildings from remote sensing imagery (RSI) is an essential task in a wide range of applications, such as urban and monitoring. Deep learning has emerged as a powerful tool for this purpose, and in this research, we propose an advanced building extraction method based on SE-ResNet18 and SE-ResNet34 architectures. These models were selected through a rigorous comparative analysis of various deep learning models, including variations of residual networks (ResNet), squeeze-and-excitation residual networks (SE-ResNet), and visual geometry group (VGG), for their high performance in all metrics and their computational efficiency. Our proposed methodology outperformed all other models under consideration by a significant margin, demonstrating its robustness and efficiency. It achieved superior results with less computational effort and time, a testament to its potential as a powerful tool for semantic segmentation tasks in remote sensing applications. An extensive comparative evaluation involving a wide range of state-of-the-art works further validated our method’s effectiveness. Our method achieved an unparalleled intersection over union (IoU) score of 88.51%, indicative of its exceptional accuracy in identifying and segmenting buildings within the Wuhan University (WHU) building dataset. The overall performance of our method, which offers an excellent balance between high performance and computational efficiency, makes it a compelling choice for researchers and practitioners in the field.