A Boundary-Assisted Multi-Scale Transformer for Object-Level Building Extraction from Satellite Remote Sensing Imagery

Building extraction is a core task in the semantic segmentation of satellite remote sensing imagery. Conventional pixel-level segmentation methods often prioritize texture over geometric structure, resulting in suboptimal performance in complex scenes affected by illumination variations, shadows, and scale changes. In this article, an innovative object-level building extraction approach is introduced to better capture the geometric structure of buildings, which incorporates superpixel segmentation to represent images as a set of adjacent regions. The proposed model consists of a cascade multi-scale fusion module (CMSFM) that progressively integrates contextual information across different receptive fields, along with a boundary-assisted loss function designed to enhance edge delineation and improve object-level accuracy. The experimental results on the WHU building dataset and the Massachusetts Buildings Dataset show that the proposed method notably outperforms other representative semantic segmentation approaches, such as FCN, UNet, DeepLab V3, and SETR. On the WHU dataset, MRLNet achieves the largest MIoU of 90.14% and the highest F1 score of 92.47%. On the Massachusetts Buildings Dataset, MRLNet attains the best MIoU of 83.14% and the highest F1 score of 90.46%. In addition, our building extraction model achieves a substantial performance improvement after the addition of the CMSFM module and the boundary-assisted loss function, demonstrating the effectiveness of these two enhancements used in our proposed model. It is expected that this research can provide a promising tool for the accurate extraction of buildings using satellite remote sensing images, which is indispensable in urban planning, disaster assessment, and other fields.