Correg-Yolov3:a Method for Dense Buildings Detection in High-resolution Remote Sensing Images

The exploration of building detection plays an important role in urban planning, smart city and military. Aiming at the problem of high overlapping ratio of detection frames for dense building detection in high resolution remote sensing images, we present an effective YOLOv3 framework, corner regression-based YOLOv3 (Correg-YOLOv3), to localize dense building accurately. This improved YOLOv3 algorithm establishes a vertex regression mechanism and an additional loss item about building vertex offsets relative to the center point of bounding box. By extending output dimensions, the trained model is able to output the rectangular bounding boxes and the building vertices meanwhile. Finally, we evaluate the performance of the Correg-YOLOv3 on our self-produced data set and provide a comparative analysis qualitatively and quantitatively. The experimental results achieve high performance in precision (96.45%), recall rate (95.75%), F1 score (96.10%) and average precision (98.05%), which were 2.73%, 5.4%, 4.1% and 4.73% higher than that of YOLOv3. Therefore, our proposed algorithm effectively tackles the problem of dense building detection in high resolution images.