Building extraction from very high resolution (VHR) imagery plays an important role in urban planning, disaster management, navigation, updating geographic databases, and several other geospatial applications. Compared with the traditional building extraction approaches, deep learning networks have recently shown outstanding performance in this task by using both high-level and low-level feature maps. However, it is difficult to utilize different level features rationally with the present deep learning networks. To tackle this problem, a novel network based on DenseNets and the attention mechanism was proposed, called the dense-attention network (DAN). The DAN contains an encoder part and a decoder part which are separately composed of lightweight DenseNets and a spatial attention fusion module. The proposed encoder–decoder architecture can strengthen feature propagation and effectively bring higher-level feature information to suppress the low-level feature and noises. Experimental results based on public international society for photogrammetry and remote sensing (ISPRS) datasets with only red–green–blue (RGB) images demonstrated that the proposed DAN achieved a higher score (96.16% overall accuracy (OA), 92.56% F1 score, 90.56% mean intersection over union (MIOU), less training and response time and higher-quality value) when compared with other deep learning methods.

Land use classification is a fundamental task of information extraction from remote sensing imagery. Semantic segmentation based on deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) has shown outstanding performance in this task. However, these methods are still affected by the loss of spatial features. In this study, we proposed a new network, called the dense-coordconv network (DCCN), to reduce the loss of spatial features and strengthen object boundaries. In this network, the coordconv module is introduced into the improved DenseNet architecture to improve spatial information by putting coordinate information into feature maps. The proposed DCCN achieved an obvious performance in terms of the public ISPRS (International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing) 2D semantic labeling benchmark dataset. Compared with the results of other deep convolutional neural networks (U-net, SegNet, Deeplab-V3), the results of the DCCN method improved a lot and the OA (overall accuracy) and mean F1 score reached 89.48% and 86.89%, respectively. This indicates that the DCCN method can effectively reduce the loss of spatial features and improve the accuracy of semantic segmentation in high resolution remote sensing imagery.