FEPA-Net: A Building Extraction Network Based on Fusing the Feature Extraction and Position Attention Module

The extraction of buildings from remote sensing images is of crucial significance in urban management and planning, but it remains difficult to automatically extract buildings with precise boundaries from remote sensing images. In this paper, we propose the FEPA-Net network model, which integrates the feature extraction and position attention module for the extraction of buildings in remote sensing images. The suggested model is implemented by employing U-Net as a base model. Firstly, the number of convolutional operations in the model was increased to extract more abstract features of the objects on the ground; secondly, within the network, the ordinary convolution is substituted with the dilated convolution. This substitution aims to broaden the receptive field, with the primary intention of enabling the output of each convolution layer to incorporate a broader spectrum of feature information. Additionally, a feature extraction module is added to mitigate the loss of detailed features. Finally, the position attention module is introduced to obtain more context information. The model undergoes validation and analysis using the Massachusetts dataset and the WHU dataset. The experimental results demonstrate that the FEPA-Net model outperforms other comparative methods in quantitative evaluation. Specifically, compared to the U-Net model, the average cross-merge ratio on the two datasets improves by 1.41% and 1.43%, respectively. The comparison of the results shows that the FEPA-Net model effectively improves the accuracy of building extraction, reduces the phenomenon of wrong detection and omission, and can more clearly identify the building outline.