Automatic detection and extraction of buildings from aerial images are considerable challenges in many applications, including disaster management, navigation, urbanization monitoring, emergency responses, 3D city mapping and reconstruction. However, the most important problem is to precisely localize buildings from single aerial images where there is no additional information such as LiDAR point cloud data or high resolution Digital Surface Models (DSMs). In this paper, a Deep Learning (DL)-based approach is proposed to localize buildings, estimate the relative height information, and extract the buildings’ boundaries using a single aerial image. In order to detect buildings and extract the bounding boxes, a Fully Connected Convolutional Neural Network (FC-CNN) is trained to classify building and non-building objects. We also introduced a novel Multi-Scale Convolutional-Deconvolutional Network (MS-CDN) including skip connection layers to predict normalized DSMs (nDSMs) from a single image. The extracted bounding boxes as well as predicted nDSMs are then employed by an Active Contour Model (ACM) to provide precise boundaries of buildings. The experiments show that, even having noises in the predicted nDSMs, the proposed method performs well on single aerial images with different building shapes. The quality rate for building detection is about 86% and the RMSE for nDSM prediction is about 4 m. Also, the accuracy of boundary extraction is about 68%. Since the proposed framework is based on a single image, it could be employed for real time applications.
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