Building Extraction and Number Statistics in WUI Areas Based on UNet Structure and Ensemble Learning

Abstract

Following the advancement and progression of urbanization, management problems of the wildland–urban interface (WUI) have become increasingly serious. WUI regional governance issues involve many factors including climate, humanities, etc., and have attracted attention and research from all walks of life. Building research plays a vital part in the WUI area. Building location is closely related with the planning and management of the WUI area, and the number of buildings is related to the rescue arrangement. There are two major methods to obtain this building information: one is to obtain them from relevant agencies, which is slow and lacks timeliness, while the other approach is to extract them from high-resolution remote sensing images, which is relatively inexpensive and offers improved timeliness. Inspired by the recent successful application of deep learning, in this paper, we propose a method for extracting building information from high-resolution remote sensing images based on deep learning, which is combined with ensemble learning to extract the building location. Further, we use the idea of image anomaly detection to estimate the number of buildings. After verification on two datasets, we obtain superior semantic segmentation results and achieve better building contour extraction and number estimation.

Keywords

• deep learning
• building extraction
• ensemble learning
• GAN