Generative building feature estimation from satellite images

Liu He, Jie Shan, Daniel Aliaga

Abstract: Urban and environmental researchers seek to obtain building features (e.g., building shapes, counts, and areas) at large scales. However, blurriness, occlusions, and noise from prevailing satellite images severely hinder the performance of image segmentation, super-resolution, or deep-learning-based translation networks. In this article, we combine globally available satellite images and spatial geometric feature datasets to create a generative modeling framework that enables obtaining significantly improved accuracy in per-building feature estimation and the generation of visually plausible building footprints. Our approach is a novel design that compensates for the degradation present in satellite images by using a novel deep network setup that includes segmentation, generative modeling, and adversarial learning for instance-level building features. Our method has proven its robustness through large-scale prototypical experiments covering heterogeneous scenarios from dense urban to sparse rural. Results show better quality over advanced segmentation networks for urban and environmental planning, and show promise for future continental-scale urban applications.