A Modular CNN-based Building Detector for Remote Sensing Images

Abstract

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have resurged lately due to their state-of-the-art performance in various disciplines, such as computer vision, audio and text processing. However, CNNs have not been widely employed for remote sensing applications. In this paper, we propose a CNN architecture, named Modular-CNN, to improve the performance of building detectors that employ Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) and Local Binary Patterns (LBP) in a remote sensing dataset. Additionally, we propose two improvements to increase the classification accuracy of Modular-CNN. The first improvement combines the power of raw and normalised features, while the second one concerns the Euler transformation of feature vectors. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed Modular-CNN and the novel improvements in remote sensing and other datasets in a comparative study with other state-of-the-art methods.