Enhancing Building Segmentation With Shadow-Aware Edge Perception

Abstract

Accurate building semantic segmentation in remote sensing imagery is essential for urban planning, environmental monitoring, and map creation. While deep learning has achieved significant advancements in this field, precisely segmenting building edges and shadows in complex scenarios remains challenging. Shadows often introduce boundary ambiguities, affecting the local shape and texture information of buildings. Current methods do not fully perceive or utilize shadows. To address these challenges, we propose an advanced high-resolution image segmentation network, high-resolution network, integrated with a shadow-inclusive edge perception module. Our approach involves introducing a shadow-inclusive contour transition module (SCTM) during the feature extraction stage to enhance the features of blurry boundaries. The proposed SCTM and shadow-aware attention module significantly enhance attention maps, improve responses in blurry boundary regions, and increase consistency between predictions and ground truth, setting a new benchmark for building semantic segmentation in remote sensing imagery. This enriched information is then fed into an attention module that concurrently focuses on boundary and channel features, surpassing traditional semantic segmentation methods. We validated our method on three datasets: Massachusetts, WHU, and Inria. Our approach outperformed state-of-the-art methods on the WHU Building Dataset across all metrics, including mIoU, Accuracy, Kappa, and Dice coefficient.

Keywords

• Buildings segmentation
• remote sensing
• semantic segmentation
• shadow-aware attention module
• shadow-inclusive contour transition module (SCTM)