Multi-Scale Guided Context-Aware Transformer for Remote Sensing Building Extraction

Building extraction from high-resolution remote sensing imagery is critical for urban planning and disaster management, yet remains challenging due to significant intra-class variability in architectural styles and multi-scale distribution patterns of buildings. To address these limitations, we propose the Multi-Scale Guided Context-Aware Network (MSGCANet), a Transformer-based multi-scale guided context-aware network. Our framework integrates a Contextual Exploration Module (CEM) that synergizes asymmetric and progressive dilated convolutions to hierarchically expand receptive fields, enhancing discriminability for dense building features. We further design a Window-Guided Multi-Scale Attention Mechanism (WGMSAM) to dynamically establish cross-scale spatial dependencies through adaptive window partitioning, enabling precise fusion of local geometric details and global contextual semantics. Additionally, a cross-level Transformer decoder leverages deformable convolutions for spatially adaptive feature alignment and joint channel-spatial modeling. Experimental results show that MSGCANet achieves IoU values of 75.47%, 91.53%, and 83.10%, and F1-scores of 86.03%, 95.59%, and 90.78% on the Massachusetts, WHU, and Inria datasets, respectively, demonstrating robust performance across these datasets.