Semi-Supervised Building Detection from High-Resolution Remote Sensing Imagery

Urban building information reflects the status and trends of a region’s development and is essential for urban sustainability. Detection of buildings from high-resolution (HR) remote sensing images (RSIs) provides a practical approach for quickly acquiring building information. Mainstream building detection methods are based on fully supervised deep learning networks, which require a large number of labeled RSIs. In practice, manually labeling building instances in RSIs is labor-intensive and time-consuming. This study introduces semi-supervised deep learning techniques for building detection and proposes a semi-supervised building detection framework to alleviate this problem. Specifically, the framework is based on teacher–student mutual learning and consists of two key modules: the color and Gaussian augmentation (CGA) module and the consistency learning (CL) module. The CGA module is designed to enrich the diversity of building features and the quantity of labeled images for better training of an object detector. The CL module derives a novel consistency loss by imposing consistency of predictions from augmented unlabeled images to enhance the detection ability on the unlabeled RSIs. The experimental results on three challenging datasets show that the proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art building detection methods and semi-supervised object detection methods. This study develops a new approach for optimizing the building detection task and a methodological reference for the various object detection tasks on RSIs.