Change detection extracts change areas in bitemporal remote sensing images, and plays an important role in urban construction and coordination. However, due to image offsets and brightness differences in bitemporal remote sensing images, traditional change detection algorithms often have reduced applicability and accuracy. The development of deep learning-based algorithms has improved their applicability and accuracy; however, existing models use either convolutions or transformers in the feature encoding stage. During feature extraction, local fine features and global features in images cannot always be obtained simultaneously. To address these issues, we propose a novel end-to-end change detection network (EGCTNet) with a fusion encoder (FE) that combines convolutional neural network (CNN) and transformer features. An intermediate decoder (IMD) eliminates global noise introduced during the encoding stage. We noted that ground objects have clearer semantic information and improved edge features. Therefore, we propose an edge detection branch (EDB) that uses object edges to guide mask features. We conducted extensive experiments on the LEVIR-CD and WHU-CD datasets, and EGCTNet exhibits good performance in detecting small and large building objects. On the LEVIR-CD dataset, we obtain F1 and IoU scores of 0.9008 and 0.8295. On the WHU-CD dataset, we obtain F1 and IoU scores of 0.9070 and 0.8298. Experimental results show that our model outperforms several previous change detection methods.

The automated detection of buildings in remote sensing images enables understanding the distribution information of buildings, which is indispensable for many geographic and social applications, such as urban planning, change monitoring and population estimation. The performance of deep learning in images often depends on a large number of manually labeled samples, the production of which is time-consuming and expensive. Thus, this study focuses on reducing the number of labeled samples used and proposing a semi-supervised deep learning approach based on an edge detection network (SDLED), which is the first to introduce semi-supervised learning to the edge detection neural network for extracting building roof boundaries from high-resolution remote sensing images. This approach uses a small number of labeled samples and abundant unlabeled images for joint training. An expert-level semantic edge segmentation model is trained based on labeled samples, which guides unlabeled images to generate pseudo-labels automatically. The inaccurate label sets and manually labeled samples are used to update the semantic edge model together. Particularly, we modified the semantic segmentation network D-LinkNet to obtain high-quality pseudo-labels. Specifically, the main network architecture of D-LinkNet is retained while the multi-scale fusion is added in its second half to improve its performance on edge detection. The SDLED was tested on high-spatial-resolution remote sensing images taken from Google Earth. Results show that the SDLED performs better than the fully supervised method. Moreover, when the trained models were used to predict buildings in the neighboring counties, our approach was superior to the supervised way, with line IoU improvement of at least 6.47% and F1 score improvement of at least 7.49%.

Automatically extracting 2D buildings from high-resolution remote sensing images is among the most popular research directions in the area of remote sensing information extraction. Semantic segmentation based on a CNN or transformer has greatly improved building extraction accuracy. A CNN is good at local feature extraction, but its ability to acquire global features is poor, which can lead to incorrect and missed detection of buildings. The advantage of transformer models lies in their global receptive field, but they do not perform well in extracting local features, resulting in poor local detail for building extraction. We propose a CNN-based and transformer-based dual-stream feature extraction network (DSFENet) in this paper, for accurate building extraction. In the encoder, convolution extracts the local features for buildings, and the transformer realizes the global representation of the buildings. The effective combination of local and global features greatly enhances the network’s feature extraction ability. We validated the capability of DSFENet on the Google Image dataset and the ISPRS Vaihingen dataset. DSEFNet achieved the best accuracy performance compared to other state-of-the-art models.

Building extraction is a basic task in the field of remote sensing, and it has also been a popular research topic in the past decade. However, the shape of the semantic polygon generated by semantic segmentation is irregular and does not match the actual building boundary. The boundary of buildings generated by semantic edge detection has difficulty ensuring continuity and integrity. Due to the aforementioned problems, we cannot directly apply the results in many drawing tasks and engineering applications. In this paper, we propose a novel convolutional neural network (CNN) model based on multitask learning, Dense D-LinkNet (DDLNet), which adopts full-scale skip connections and edge guidance module to ensure the effective combination of low-level information and high-level information. DDLNet has good adaptability to both semantic segmentation tasks and edge detection tasks. Moreover, we propose a universal postprocessing method that integrates semantic edges and semantic polygons. It can solve the aforementioned problems and more accurately locate buildings, especially building boundaries. The experimental results show that DDLNet achieves great improvements compared with other edge detection and semantic segmentation networks. Our postprocessing method is effective and universal.

Edge detection of ground objects is a typical task in the field of remote sensing and has advantages in accomplishing many complex ground object extraction tasks. Although recent mainstream edge detection methods based on deep learning have significant effects, these methods have a very high dependence on the quantity and quality of samples. Moreover, using datasets from other domains in detection tasks often leads to degraded network performance due to variations in the ground objects in different regions. If this problem can be solved to allow datasets from other domains to be reused, the number of labeled samples required in the new task domain can be reduced, thereby shortening the task cycle and reducing task costs. In this paper, we propose a weakly supervised domain adaptation method to address the high dependence of edge extraction networks on samples. The domain adaptation is performed on the edge level and the semantic level, which prevents deviations in the semantic features that are caused by the overgeneralization of edge features. Additionally, the effectiveness of our proposed domain adaptation module is verified. Finally, we demonstrate the superior edge extraction performance of our method in the SEGOS edge extraction network in contrast to other edge extraction methods.