MSegnet, a Practical Network for Building Detection from High Spatial Resolution Images

Building detection in big earth data by remote sensing is crucial for urban development. However, improving its accuracy remains challenging due to complicated background objects and different viewing angles from various remotely sensed images. The hereto proposed methods predominantly focus on multi-scale feature learning, which omits features in multiple aspect ratios. Moreover, postprocessing is required to refine the segmentation performance. We propose modified semantic segmentation (MSegnet), a single-shot semantic segmentation model based on a matrix of convolution layers to extract features in multiple scales and aspect ratios. MSegnet consists of two modules: backbone feature learning and matrix convolution to conduct vertical and horizontal learning. The matrix convolution comprises a set of convolution operations with different aspect ratios. MSegnet is applied to a public building data set that is widely used for evaluation and shown to achieve satisfactory accuracy, compared with the published single-shot methods.