Foreground-Aware Refinement Network for Building Extraction from Remote Sensing Images

Abstract

To extract buildings accurately, we propose a foreground-aware refinement network for building extraction. In particular, in order to reduce the false positive of buildings, we design the foreground-aware module using the attention gate block, which effectively suppresses the features of nonbuilding and enhances the sensitivity of the model to buildings. In addition, we introduce the reverse attention mechanism in the detail refinement module. Specifically, this module guides the network to learn to supplement the missing details of the buildings by erasing the currently predicted regions of buildings and achieves more accurate and complete building extraction. To further optimize the network, we design hybrid loss, which combines BCE loss and SSIM loss, to supervise network learning from both pixel and structure layers. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our network over state-of-the-art methods in terms of both quantitative metrics and visual quality.