Location-Specific Embedding Learning for the Semantic Segmentation of Building Footprints on a Global Scale

In this paper, we analyze the feasability of learning a latent embedding space from aerial and satellite imagery in order to capture semantic properties of geographical locations. We show that deep neural network, trained with a triplet loss function, can be effectively used to obtain a location-specific embedding. Considering the problem of building footprint segmentation from aerial imagery of varying cities, we leverage these embeddings together with a clustering for the training of location-specific segmentation networks and the selection of the corresponding segmentation network during inference time. We evaluate our approach on the large-scale Inria Aerial Image Labeling Dataset which contains aerial images of globally distributed cities. Our approach achieves an outperformance against state-of-the-art approaches on the Intersection over Union metric for the building class over all cities and by more than 2% for specific cities.