Accurate building detection is a critical task in urban development and digital city mapping. However, current building detection models for high-resolution remote sensing images are still facing challenges due to complex object characteristics and similarities in appearance. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel algorithm for building detection based on in-depth feature extraction and classification of adaptive superpixel shredding. The proposed approach consists of four main steps: image segmentation into homogeneous superpixels using a modified Simple Linear Iterative Clustering (SLIC), in-depth feature extraction using an variational auto-encoder (VAE) scale on the superpixels for training and testing data collection, identification of four classes (buildings, roads, trees, and shadows) using extracted feature data as input to an Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), and extraction of building shapes through regional growth and morphological operations. The proposed approach offers more stability in identifying buildings with unclear boundaries, eliminating the requirement for extensive prior segmentation. It has been tested on two datasets of high-resolution aerial images from the New Zealand region, demonstrating superior accuracy compared to previous works with an average F1 score of 98.83%. The proposed approach shows potential for fast and accurate urban monitoring and city planning, particularly in urban areas.

Automatic image annotation is an active field of research in which a set of annotations are automatically assigned to images based on their content. In literature, some works opted for handcrafted features and manual approaches of linking concepts to images, whereas some others involved convolutional neural networks (CNNs) as black boxes to solve the problem without external interference. In this work, we introduce a hybrid approach that combines the advantages of both CNN and the conventional concept-to-image assignment approaches. J-image segmentation (JSEG) is firstly used to segment the image into a set of homogeneous regions, then a CNN is employed to produce a rich feature descriptor per area, and then, vector of locally aggregated descriptors (VLAD) is applied to the extracted features to generate compact and unified descriptors. Thereafter, the not too deep clustering (N2D clustering) algorithm is performed to define local manifolds constituting the feature space, and finally, the semantic relatedness is calculated for both image–concept and concept–concept using KNN regression to better grasp the meaning of concepts and how they relate. Through a comprehensive experimental evaluation, our method has indicated a superiority over a wide range of recent related works by yielding F1 scores of 58.89% and 80.24% with the datasets Corel 5k and MSRC v2, respectively. Additionally, it demonstrated a relatively high capacity of learning more concepts with higher accuracy, which results in N+ of 212 and 22 with the datasets Corel 5k and MSRC v2, respectively.