PolyBuild: New AI Method for Extracting Building Outlines from Satellite Images
Researchers have developed PolyBuild, an end-to-end deep learning method that extracts polygonal building contours from high-resolution remote sensing images without requiring post-processing steps. The system combines an Initial Contour Generation Module and a Contour Optimization Module using a hybrid CNN-Transformer architecture to detect and refine building boundaries. The work, accepted to IEEE JSTARS, claims to outperform existing mask-based and contour-based approaches on three benchmark datasets.
PolyBuild is a newly proposed end-to-end framework for automatically extracting vector polygon outlines of buildings from high-resolution satellite or aerial imagery. Unlike mainstream approaches that rely on pixel-level segmentation followed by computationally intensive post-processing pipelines, PolyBuild directly outputs building vector polygons in a single pass. The method uses two core modules: an Initial Contour Generation Module (ICGM), which simultaneously performs object detection and rough contour extraction using sub-region center features, and a Contour Optimization Module (COM), which iteratively refines contours by combining convolutional neural network features with a Transformer-based decoder. This hybrid architecture is designed to capture both fine-grained local boundary details and broader global spatial context. The authors report that PolyBuild significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods across three building extraction datasets. The paper has been accepted for publication in the IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing (JSTARS).
What's missing
The abstract does not specify which three benchmark datasets were used for evaluation, the exact performance metrics or margin of improvement over baselines, computational cost or inference speed comparisons, or how the method performs under particularly challenging conditions such as dense urban scenes, occluded buildings, or non-nadir viewing angles. Generalizability to imagery from different sensors or geographic regions is also not addressed.
What different sources said
- arXiv cs.AICenter
PolyBuild: An End-to-End Method for Polygonal Building Contour Extraction from High-Resolution Remote Sensing Images
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