PolyR-CNN: R-CNN for end-to-end polygonal building outline extraction

Weiqin Jiao*, Claudio Persello, George Vosselman

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

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Abstract

Polygonal building outline extraction has been a research focus in recent years. Most existing methods have addressed this challenging task by decomposing it into several subtasks and employing carefully designed architectures. Despite their accuracy, such pipelines often introduce inefficiencies during training and inference. This paper presents an end-to-end framework, denoted as PolyR-CNN, which offers an efficient and fully integrated approach to predict vectorized building polygons and bounding boxes directly from remotely sensed images. Notably, PolyR-CNN leverages solely the features of the Region of Interest (RoI) for the prediction, thereby mitigating the necessity for complex designs. Furthermore, we propose a novel scheme with PolyR-CNN to extract detailed outline information from polygon vertex coordinates, termed vertex proposal feature, to guide the RoI features to predict more regular buildings. PolyR-CNN demonstrates the capacity to deal with buildings with holes through a simple post-processing method on the Inria dataset. Comprehensive experiments conducted on the CrowdAI dataset show that PolyR-CNN achieves competitive accuracy compared to state-of-the-art methods while significantly improving computational efficiency, i.e., achieving 79.2 Average Precision (AP), exhibiting a 15.9 AP gain and operating 2.5 times faster and four times lighter than the well-established end-to-end method PolyWorld. Replacing the backbone with a simple ResNet-50, PolyR-CNN maintains a 71.1 AP while running four times faster than PolyWorld. The code is available at: https://github.com/HeinzJiao/PolyR-CNN.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)33-43
Number of pages11
JournalISPRS journal of photogrammetry and remote sensing
Volume218
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Dec 2024

Keywords

  • Buildings with holes
  • Fully end-to-end
  • Polygon R-CNN
  • Polygonal building outline extraction
  • Vertex proposal feature
  • ITC-HYBRID
  • ITC-ISI-JOURNAL-ARTICLE
  • UT-Hybrid-D

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