HFER-SAM: Boundary-Aware Segment Anything Model via High-Frequency Enhanced and Residual Injection for Building Extraction

Automatic building extraction from high-resolution remote sensing imagery is vital for urban applications. Although the Segment Anything Model (SAM) offers powerful semantic capabilities, its direct application faces severe challenges. The inherent low-pass filtering of Vision Transformers typically causes blurred building edges, distorted right angles, and severe adhesion among dense clusters. To address these bottlenecks, we propose a Boundary-Aware Segment Anything Model via High-Frequency Enhanced and Residual Injection (HFER-SAM). First, a Multi-scale Semantic Adaptation Module (MSAM) uses domain adapters and coordinate attention to recover spatial priors for precise domain alignment. Second, a High-Frequency Residual Injection Module (HFRIM) employs a lightweight CNN to extract roof textures and edge gradients. These are injected as residual terms into the semantic stream to explicitly sharpen physical boundaries. Finally, a Boundary-Constrained Dual-Task Head (BC-DTH) utilizes morphological supervision to sever erroneous connections between adjacent buildings and resolve target adhesion. Experiments on the WHU and Inria datasets reveal that HFER-SAM achieves an Intersection over Union of 91.53% and 82.06%, respectively. Our method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art models in both accuracy and boundary fidelity, providing a robust avenue for high-precision building mapping.

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Publication Details

Journal
Remote Sensing
Published
2026-10-15
DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/rs18203531
Primary Topic
Automated Road and Building Extraction
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00

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article

HFER-SAM: Boundary-Aware Segment Anything Model via High-Frequency Enhanced and Residual Injection for Building Extraction

Aihua Shen, Junfeng Xu, Jiazhen Bao, Aixia Liu et al.
Remote Sensing
Automated Road and Building Extraction
article

HFER-SAM: Boundary-Aware Segment Anything Model via High-Frequency Enhanced and Residual Injection for Building Extraction

Aihua Shen, Junfeng Xu, Jiazhen Bao, Aixia Liu, Xu Han, Lijian Xie, Jinsong Deng, Panpan Ma, Yun He, Xin Zhao
article en

Abstract

Automatic building extraction from high-resolution remote sensing imagery is vital for urban applications. Although the Segment Anything Model (SAM) offers powerful semantic capabilities, its direct application faces severe challenges. The inherent low-pass filtering of Vision Transformers typically causes blurred building edges, distorted right angles, and severe adhesion among dense clusters. To address these bottlenecks, we propose a Boundary-Aware Segment Anything Model via High-Frequency Enhanced and Residual Injection (HFER-SAM). First, a Multi-scale Semantic Adaptation Module (MSAM) uses domain adapters and coordinate attention to recover spatial priors for precise domain alignment. Second, a High-Frequency Residual Injection Module (HFRIM) employs a lightweight CNN to extract roof textures and edge gradients. These are injected as residual terms into the semantic stream to explicitly sharpen physical boundaries. Finally, a Boundary-Constrained Dual-Task Head (BC-DTH) utilizes morphological supervision to sever erroneous connections between adjacent buildings and resolve target adhesion. Experiments on the WHU and Inria datasets reveal that HFER-SAM achieves an Intersection over Union of 91.53% and 82.06%, respectively. Our method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art models in both accuracy and boundary fidelity, providing a robust avenue for high-precision building mapping.

Remote SensingVol. 18(20)
Ministry of Natural Resources (CN), Zhejiang Academy of Forestry (CN), Zhejiang University (CN)
National Key Research and Development Program of China
Sustainable cities and communities
Openalex Percentile: Top 18%
Automated Road and Building Extraction
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