BuildFormer: Automatic building extraction with vision transformer

Building extraction from fine-resolution remote sensing images plays a vital role in numerous geospatial applications, such as urban planning, population statistic, economic assessment and disaster management. With the advancement of deep learning technology, deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) have dominated the automatic building extraction task for many years. However, the local property of DCNNs limits the extraction of global information, weakening the ability of the network for recognizing the building instance. Recently, the Transformer comprises a hot topic in the computer vision domain and achieves state-of-the-art performance in fundamental vision tasks, such as image classification, semantic segmentation and object detection. Inspired by this, in this paper, we propose a novel transformer-based network for extracting buildings from fine-resolution remote sensing images, namely BuildFormer. In Comparision with the ResNet, the proposed method achieves an improvement of 2% in mIoU on the WHU building dataset.