A Ternary-attention Capsule Feature Pyramid Network for Building Footprint Extraction from Remote Sensing Imagery

The up-to-date and accurate building footprint database plays a significant role in a large variety of applications. Recently, remote sensing images have provided an important data source for building footprint extraction tasks. However, due to topology variations, color diversities, and complicated rooftop and environmental scenarios, it is still a challenging task to realize fully automated and highly accurate extraction of building footprints from remote sensing images. In this paper, we propose a novel ternary-attention capsule feature pyramid network (TA-CapsFPN), which is formulated with a capsule feature pyramid network architecture and integrated with context-augmentation and feature attention modules, aiming at improving the building footprint extraction accuracy by combining the superior properties of capsule representations and the powerful capability of attention mechanisms. Quantitative evaluations and comparative analyses show that the TA-CapsFPN provides a promising and competitive performance in processing buildings of varying conditions.