Integrating attention mechanism and boundary detection for building segmentation from remote sensing images

Accurate building segmentation has become critical in various fields such as urban management, urban planning, mapping, and navigation. With the increasing diversity in the number, size, and shape of buildings, convolutional neural networks have been used to segment and extract buildings from such images, resulting in increased efficiency and utilization of image features. We propose a building semantic segmentation method to improve the traditional Unet convolutional neural network by integrating attention mechanism and boundary detection. The attention mechanism module combines attention in the channel and spatial dimensions. The module captures image feature information in the channel dimension using a one-dimensional convolutional cross-channel method and automatically adjusts the cross-channel dimension using adaptive convolutional kernel size. Additionally, a weighted boundary loss function is designed to replace the traditional semantic segmentation cross-entropy loss to detect the boundary of a building. The loss function optimizes the extraction of building boundaries in backpropagation, ensuring the integrity of building boundary extraction in the shadow part. Experimental results show that the proposed model AMBDNet achieves high-performance metrics, including a recall rate of 0.9046, an IoU of 0.7797, and a pixel accuracy of 0.9140 on high-resolution remote sensing images, demonstrating its robustness and effectiveness in precise building segmentation. Experimental results further indicate that AMBDNet improves the single-class recall of buildings by 0.0322 and the single-class pixel accuracy by 0.0169 in the high-resolution remote sensing image recognition task.