GIS-Supervised Building Extraction With Label Noise-Adaptive Fully Convolutional Neural Network

Abstract

Automatic building extraction from aerial or satellite images is a dense pixel prediction task for many applications. It demands a large number of clean label data to train a deep neural network for building extraction. But it is labor expensive to collect such pixel-wise annotated data manually. Fortunately, the building footprint data of geographic information system (GIS) maps provide a cheap way of generating building label data, but these labels are imperfect due to misalignment between the GIS maps and images. In this letter, we consider the task of learning a deep neural network to label images pixel-wise from such noisy label data for building extraction. To this end, we propose a general label noise-adaptive (NA) neural network framework consisting of a base network followed by an additional probability transition modular (PTM) which is introduced to capture the relationship between the true label and the noisy label. The parameters of the PTM can be estimated as part of the training process of the whole network by the off-the-shelf backpropagation algorithm. We conduct experiments on real-world data set to demonstrate that our proposed PTM can better handle noisy labels and improve the performance of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) trained on the noisy label data generated by GIS maps for building extraction. The experimental results indicate that being armed with our proposed PTM for fully CNN, it provides a promising solution to reduce manual annotation effort for the labor-expensive object extraction tasks from remote sensing images.