Rural Building Detection in High-Resolution Imagery Based on a Two-Stage CNN Model

High-level feature extraction and hierarchical feature representation of image objects with a convolutional neural network (CNN) can overcome the limitations of the traditional building detection models using middle/low-level features extracted from a complex background. Aiming at the drawbacks of manual village location, high cost, and the limited accuracy of building detection in the existing rural building detection models, a two-stage CNN model is proposed in this letter to detect rural buildings in high-resolution imagery. Simulating the hierarchical processing mechanism of human vision, the proposed model is constructed with two CNNs, whose architectures can automatically locate villages and efficiently detect buildings, respectively. This two-stage CNN model effectively reduces the complexity of the background and improves the efficiency of rural building detection. The experiments showed that the proposed model could automatically locate all the villages in the two study areas, achieving a building detection accuracy of 88%. Compared with the existing models, the proposed model was proved to be effective in detecting buildings in rural areas with a complex background.