Learning to Extract Building Footprints From Off-Nadir Aerial Images

Extracting building footprints from aerial images is essential for precise urban mapping with photogrammetric computer vision technologies. Existing approaches mainly assume that the roof and footprint of a building are well overlapped, which may not hold in off-nadir aerial images as there is often a big offset between them. In this paper, we propose an offset vector learning scheme, which turns the building footprint extraction problem in off-nadir images into an instance-level joint prediction problem of the building roof and its corresponding “ <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">roof to footprint</i> ” offset vector. Thus the footprint can be estimated by translating the predicted roof mask according to the predicted offset vector. We further propose a simple but effective feature-level offset augmentation module, which can significantly refine the offset vector prediction by introducing little extra cost. Moreover, a new dataset, Buildings in Off-Nadir Aerial Images (BONAI), is created and released in this paper. It contains 268,958 building instances across 3,300 aerial images with fully annotated instance-level roof, footprint, and corresponding offset vector for each building. Experiments on the BONAI dataset demonstrate that our method achieves the state-of-the-art, outperforming other competitors by 3.37 to 7.39 points in F1-score. The codes, datasets, and trained models are available at <uri xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://github.com/jwwangchn/BONAI.git</uri> .