While most state-of-the-art instance segmentation methods produce pixel-wise segmentation masks, numerous applications demand precise vector polygons of detected objects instead of rasterized output. This paper proposes Re:PolyWorld as a remastered and improved version of PolyWorld, a neural network that extracts object vertices from an image and connects them optimally to generate precise polygons. The objective of this work was to overcome weaknesses and shortcomings of the original model, as well as introducing an improved polygonal representation to obtain a general-purpose method for polygon extraction in images. The architecture has been redesigned to not only exploit vertex features, but to also make use of the visual appearance of edges. To this end, an edge-aware Graph Neural Network predicts the connection strength between each pair of vertices, which is further used to compute the assignment by solving a differentiable optimal transport problem. The proposed redefinition of the polygonal scene turns the method into a powerful generalized approach that can be applied to a large variety of tasks and problem settings, such as building extraction, floorplan reconstruction and even wireframe parsing. Re:PolyWorld not only outperforms the original model on building extraction in aerial images, thanks to the proposed joint analysis of vertices and edges, but also beats the state-of-the-art in multiple other domains.

While most state-of-the-art instance segmentation methods produce binary segmentation masks, geographic and cartographic applications typically require precise vector polygons of extracted objects instead of rasterized output. This paper introduces PolyWorld, a neural network that directly extracts building vertices from an image and connects them correctly to create precise polygons. The model predicts the connection strength between each pair of vertices using a graph neural network and estimates the assignments by solving a differentiable optimal transport problem. Moreover, the vertex positions are optimized by minimizing a combined segmentation and polygonal angle difference loss. PolyWorld significantly outperforms the state of the art in building polygonization and achieves not only notable quantitative results, but also produces visually pleasing building polygons. Code and trained weights are publicly available at https://thub.com/zorzis/yWorl-PoldPretrainedNetwork.

Building footprint generation is a vital task of satellite imagery interpretation. However, the segmentation masks of buildings obtained by existing semantic segmentation networks often have blurred boundaries and irregular shapes. In this research, we propose a new boundary regularization network for building footprint generation in satellite images. More specifically, we consider semantic segmentation and boundary regularization in an end-to-end generative adversarial network (GAN). The learned building footprints are regularized by the interplay between the generator and discriminator. By doing so, the straight boundaries and geometric details of the building could be preserved. Experiments are conducted on a collected dataset of Planetscope satellite imagery (spatial resolution: 4.77 m/pixel). Our approach is much superior to the state-of-the-art methods in both quantitative and qualitative results.

We propose a machine learning based approach for automatic regularization and polygonization of building segmentation masks. Taking an image as input, we first predict building segmentation maps exploiting genericfullyconvolutionalnetwork(FCN). Agenerativeadversarialnetwork(GAN)is then involved to perform a regularization of building boundaries to make them more realistic, i.e., having more rectilinear outlines which construct right angles if required. This is achieved through the interplay between the discriminator which gives a probability of input image being true and generator that learns from discriminator's response to create more realistic images. Finally, we train the backboneconvolutionalneuralnetwork(CNN)which is adapted to predict sparse outcomes corresponding to building corners out of regularized building segmentation results. Experiments on three building segmentation datasets demonstrate that the proposed method is not only capable of obtaining accurate results, but also of producing visually pleasing building outlines parameterized as polygons.

In the fast developing countries it is hard to trace new buildings construction or old structures destruction and, as a result, to keep the up-to-date cadastre maps. Moreover, due to the complexity of urban regions or inconsistency of data used for cadastre maps extraction, the errors in form of misalignment is a common problem. In this work, we propose an end-to-end deep learning approach which is able to solve inconsistencies between the input intensity image and the available building footprints by correcting label noises and, at the same time, misalignments if needed. The obtained results demonstrate the robustness of the proposed method to even severely misaligned examples that makes it potentially suitable for real applications, like OpenStreetMap correction.

In this paper we present a method for building boundary refinement and regularization in satellite images using a fully convolutional neural network trained with a combination of adversarial and regularized losses. Compared to a pure Mask R-CNN model, the overall algorithm can achieve equivalent performance in terms of accuracy and completeness. However, unlike Mask R-CNN that produces irregular footprints, our framework generates regularized and visually pleasing building boundaries which are beneficial in many applications.

Point cloud classification is one of the most important and time-consuming stages of airborne LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) data processing, playing a key role in the generation of cartographic products. This paper describes an innovative algorithm to perform LiDAR point-cloud classification, which relies on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and takes advantage of full-waveform data registered by modern laser scanners. The proposed method consists of two steps. First, a simple CNN is used to preprocess each waveform, providing a compact representation of the data. By exploiting the coordinates of the points associated with the waveforms, output vectors generated by the first CNN are then mapped into an image that is subsequently segmented by a Fully Convolutional Network (FCN): a label is assigned to each pixel and, consequently, to the point falling in the pixel. In this way, spatial positions and geometrical relationships between neighboring data are taken into account. These particular architectures allow to accurately identify even challenging classes such as power line and transmission tower.