Keypoint-Based Deep Learning Approach For Building Footprint Extraction Using Aerial Images

Building footprint extraction is an active topic in the domain of remote sensing, since buildings are a fundamental unit of urban areas. Deep convolutional neural networks successfully perform footprint extraction from optical satellite images. However, semantic segmentation produces coarse results in the output, such as blurred and rounded boundaries, which are caused by the use of convolutional layers with large receptive fields and pooling layers. The objective of this study is to generate visually enhanced building objects by directly extracting the vertices of individual buildings by combining instance segmentation and keypoint detection. The target keypoints in building extraction are defined as points of interest based on the local image gradient direction, that is, the vertices of a building polygon. The proposed framework follows a two-stage, top-down approach that is divided into object detection and keypoint estimation. Keypoints between instances are distinguished by merging the rough segmentation masks and the local features of regions of interest. A building polygon is created by grouping the predicted keypoints through a simple geometric method. Our model achieved an F1-score of 0.650 with an mIoU of 62.6 for building footprint extraction using the OpenCitesAI dataset. The results demonstrated that the proposed framework using keypoint estimation exhibited better segmentation performance when compared with Mask R-CNN in terms of both qualitative and quantitative results.