There remains several challenges that are encountered in the task of extracting buildings from aerial imagery using convolutional neural networks (CNNs). First, the tremendous complexity of existing building extraction networks impedes their practical application. In addition, it is arduous for networks to sufficiently utilize the various building features in different images. To address these challenges, we propose an efficient network called MSL-Net that focuses on both multiscale building features and multilevel image features. First, we use depthwise separable convolution (DSC) to significantly reduce the network complexity, and then we embed a group normalization (GN) layer in the inverted residual structure to alleviate network performance degradation. Furthermore, we extract multiscale building features through an atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) module and apply long skip connections to establish long-distance dependence to fuse features at different levels of the given image. Finally, we add a deformable convolution network layer before the pixel classification step to enhance the feature extraction capability of MSL-Net for buildings with irregular shapes. The experimental results obtained on three publicly available datasets demonstrate that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art accuracy with a faster inference speed than that of competing approaches. Specifically, the proposed MSL-Net achieves 90.4%, 81.1% and 70.9% intersection over union (IoU) values on the WHU Building Aerial Imagery dataset, Inria Aerial Image Labeling dataset and Massachusetts Buildings dataset, respectively, with an inference speed of 101.4 frames per second (FPS) for an input image of size 3 × 512 × 512 on an NVIDIA RTX 3090 GPU. With an excellent tradeoff between accuracy and speed, our proposed MSL-Net may hold great promise for use in building extraction tasks.

Detecting buildings, segmenting building footprints, and extracting building edges from high-resolution remote sensing images are vital in applications such as urban planning, change detection, smart cities, and map-making and updating. The tasks of building detection, footprint segmentation, and edge extraction affect each other to a certain extent. However, most previous works have focused on one of these three tasks and have lacked a multitask learning framework that can simultaneously solve the tasks of building detection, footprint segmentation and edge extraction, making it difficult to obtain smooth and complete buildings. This study proposes a novel multiscale and multitask deep learning framework to consider the dependencies among building detection, footprint segmentation, and edge extraction while completing all three tasks. In addition, a multitask feature fusion module is introduced into the deep learning framework to increase the robustness of feature extraction. A multitask loss function is also introduced to balance the training losses among the various tasks to obtain the best training results. Finally, the proposed method is applied to open-source building datasets and large-scale high-resolution remote sensing images and compared with other advanced building extraction methods. To verify the effectiveness of multitask learning, the performance of multitask learning and single-task training is compared in ablation experiments. The experimental results show that the proposed method has certain advantages over other methods and that multitask learning can effectively improve single-task performance.

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) perform well in tasks of segmenting buildings from remote sensing images. However, the intraclass heterogeneity of buildings is high in images, while the interclass homogeneity between buildings and other nonbuilding objects is low. This leads to an inaccurate distinction between buildings and complex backgrounds. To overcome this challenge, we propose an Attentional Feature Learning Network (AFL-Net) that can accurately extract buildings from remote sensing images. We designed an attentional multiscale feature fusion (AMFF) module and a shape feature refinement (SFR) module to improve building recognition accuracy in complex environments. The AMFF module adaptively adjusts the weights of multi-scale features through the attention mechanism, which enhances the global perception and ensures the integrity of building segmentation results. The SFR module captures the shape features of the buildings, which enhances the network capability for identifying the area between building edges and surrounding nonbuilding objects and reduces the over-segmentation of buildings. An ablation study was conducted with both qualitative and quantitative analyses, verifying the effectiveness of the AMFF and SFR modules. The proposed AFL-Net achieved 91.37, 82.10, 73.27, and 79.81% intersection over union (IoU) values on the WHU Building Aerial Imagery, Inria Aerial Image Labeling, Massachusetts Buildings, and Building Instances of Typical Cities in China datasets, respectively. Thus, the AFL-Net offers the prospect of application for successful extraction of buildings from remote sensing images.

Extraction of vectorized building outlines from high-resolution remote sensing images is highly useful for various application fields, such as map creation and urban planning. However, this process is often complicated by external factors, such as trees and shadows, which cause issues, such as excessive node redundancy, jagged lines, and unclear corner points. In this study, a multilevel regularization method was designed for building outlines, including the “overall–local–detail” levels. First, overall regularization was performed by combining the minimum bounding rectangle of the building outline with the Hausdorff distance method. Next, based on the convex hull of the building outline and the distribution characteristics of nodes along the outline, the building outline was divided into multiple line chains and classified for local regularization. Finally, the details of the building outline were processed, with the parallel and perpendicular characteristics enhanced to obtain the final regularization results. The experimental results showed that the proposed method effectively enhances the edge representation accuracy of building outlines and significantly improves the accuracy and regularity of building edges. Furthermore, it strengthens the orthogonal characteristics of building outlines, providing more accurate representations of true building outlines.

Information in non-standard address texts in Chinese is usually presented with rough content, complex and diverse presentation forms, and inconsistent hierarchical granularity, causing low accuracy in Chinese address parsing. Therefore, we propose a method for parsing non-standard address text in Chinese that integrates the Chinese Toponym Named Entity Recognition (CHTopoNER) model and a dynamic finite state machine (FSM). First, named entity recognition is performed by the CHTopoNER model. Sets of dynamic FSMs are then constructed based on the address hierarchical characteristics to sort and combine the Chinese address elements, thereby achieving address parsing on the Chinese internet. This method showed excellent accuracy in parsing both standard and non-standard placename addresses. In particular, this method performed better in address parsing for disordered or missing hierarchical elements than traditional methods using an FSM. Specifically, this method achieved accuracies of 96.6% and 96.8% for standard and non-standard placenames, respectively. These accuracies increased by 8.0% and 57.1%, respectively, compared with the integrated CHTopoNER model and traditional FSM, and by 7.4% and 19.8%, respectively, compared with the integrated CHTopoNER model and bidirectional FSM. After analysis, the address-parsing method showed good scalability and adaptability, which could be applied to various types of address-parsing tasks.

Building simplification is an important research area in automatic map generalization. Up to now, many approaches have been proposed by scholars. However, in the continuous transformation of scales for buildings, keeping the main shape characteristics, area, and orthogonality of buildings are always the key and difficult points. Therefore, this paper proposes a method of progressive simplification for buildings based on structural subdivision. In this paper, iterative simplification is adopted, which transforms the problem of building simplification into the simplification of the minimum details of building outlines. Firstly, a top priority structure (TPS) is determined, which represents the smallest detail in the outline of the building. Then, according to the orthogonality and concave–convex characteristics, the TPS are classified as 62 subdivisions, which cover the local structure of the building polygon. Then, the subdivisions are divided into four simplification types. The building is simplified to eliminate the TPS continuously, retaining the right-angle characteristics and area as much as possible, until the results satisfy the constraints and rules of simplification. A topographic dataset (1:1 K) collected from Kadaster was used for our experiments. In order to evaluate the algorithm, many tests were undertaken, including tests of multi-scale simplification and simplification of typical buildings, which indicate that this method can realize multi-scale presentation of buildings. Compared with the existing simplification methods, the comparison results show that the proposed method can simplify buildings effectively, which has certain advantages in keeping shape characteristics, area, and rectangularity.