The project “Development of an effective method for detecting small buildings in satellite imagery”

Speaker: 

Anna Zawadzka, Przemysław Głomb

Date: 

26/11/2025 - 13:30

The project “Development of an effective method for detecting small buildings in satellite imagery” aimed to develop a reliable approach for identifying small building structures (below 10×10 m) in Sentinel-2 data. Traditional segmentation and classification methods, such as U-Net or ResNet, show limited accuracy when building footprints are smaller than a pixel or surrounded by complex background elements like vegetation or shadows. Initial research revealed that a significant improvement could be achieved by enhancing the spatial resolution and task-specific representation of the imagery. Consequently, a novel framework was developed, combining Enhanced Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Network (ESRGAN) with semantic segmentation (DeepLabV3) through joint cross-training. This architecture converts Sentinel-2 imagery directly into cartographic, map-style representations optimized for building delineation and therefore becomes inherently task-oriented. To effectively train and evaluate the framework, a dedicated dataset, S2-BDOT-PL, was composed by integrating Sentinel-2 images with OpenStreetMap and Poland’s official BDOT10k topographic database. The proposed method demonstrated consistent improvement over baseline models across various metrics. The results have been presented in the paper “Map-Guided Cross-Training for Building Detection” which has been already pre-accepted (pending revision) for publication in IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters, a journal with Impact Factor of 4 (2024) and score of 140 points on the Ministerial list.

Historia zmian

Data aktualizacji: 12/11/2025 - 14:40; autor zmian: Anna Zawadzka (azawadzka@iitis.pl)

The project “Development of an effective method for detecting small buildings in satellite imagery” aimed to develop a reliable approach for identifying small building structures (below 10×10 m) in Sentinel-2 data. Traditional segmentation and classification methods, such as U-Net or ResNet, show limited accuracy when building footprints are smaller than a pixel or surrounded by complex background elements like vegetation or shadows. Initial research revealed that a significant improvement could be achieved by enhancing the spatial resolution and task-specific representation of the imagery. Consequently, a novel framework was developed, combining Enhanced Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Network (ESRGAN) with semantic segmentation (DeepLabV3) through joint cross-training. This architecture converts Sentinel-2 imagery directly into cartographic, map-style representations optimized for building delineation and therefore becomes inherently task-oriented. To effectively train and evaluate the framework, a dedicated dataset, S2-BDOT-PL, was composed by integrating Sentinel-2 images with OpenStreetMap and Poland’s official BDOT10k topographic database. The proposed method demonstrated consistent improvement over baseline models across various metrics. The results have been presented in the paper “Map-Guided Cross-Training for Building Detection” which has been already pre-accepted (pending revision) for publication in IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters, a journal with Impact Factor of 4 (2024) and score of 140 points on the Ministerial list.

Data aktualizacji: 12/11/2025 - 12:41; autor zmian: Łukasz Zimny (lzimny@iitis.pl)

The project “Development of an effective method for detecting small buildings in satellite imagery”
aimed to develop a reliable approach for identifying small building structures (below 10×10 m) in
Sentinel-2 data. Traditional segmentation and classification methods, such as U-Net or ResNet, show
limited accuracy when building footprints are smaller than a pixel or surrounded by complex
background elements like vegetation or shadows. Initial research revealed that a significant
improvement could be achieved by enhancing the spatial resolution and task-specific representation of
the imagery. Consequently, a novel framework was developed, combining Enhanced Super-Resolution
Generative Adversarial Network (ESRGAN) with semantic segmentation (DeepLabV3) through joint
cross-training. This architecture converts Sentinel-2 imagery directly into cartographic, map-style
representations optimized for building delineation and therefore becomes inherently task-oriented. To
effectively train and evaluate the framework, a dedicated dataset, S2-BDOT-PL, was composed by
integrating Sentinel-2 images with OpenStreetMap and Poland’s official BDOT10k topographic
database. The proposed method demonstrated consistent improvement over baseline models across
various metrics. The results have been presented in the paper “Map-Guided Cross-Training for Building
Detection” which has been already sent for publication in IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing
Letters, a journal with Impact Factor of 4 (2024) and score of 140 points on the Ministerial list.

Data aktualizacji: 12/11/2025 - 11:51; autor zmian: Łukasz Zimny (lzimny@iitis.pl)

The project “Development of an effective method for detecting small buildings in satellite imagery”
aimed to develop a reliable approach for identifying small building structures (below 10×10 m) in
Sentinel-2 data. Traditional segmentation and classification methods, such as U-Net or ResNet, show
limited accuracy when building footprints are smaller than a pixel or surrounded by complex
background elements like vegetation or shadows. Initial research revealed that a significant
improvement could be achieved by enhancing the spatial resolution and task-specific representation of
the imagery. Consequently, a novel framework was developed, combining Enhanced Super-Resolution
Generative Adversarial Network (ESRGAN) with semantic segmentation (DeepLabV3) through joint
cross-training. This architecture converts Sentinel-2 imagery directly into cartographic, map-style
representations optimized for building delineation and therefore becomes inherently task-oriented. To
effectively train and evaluate the framework, a dedicated dataset, S2-BDOT-PL, was composed by
integrating Sentinel-2 images with OpenStreetMap and Poland’s official BDOT10k topographic
database. The proposed method demonstrated consistent improvement over baseline models across
various metrics. The results have been presented in the paper “Map-Guided Cross-Training for Building
Detection” which has been already sent for publication in IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing
Letters, a journal with Impact Factor of 4 (2024) and score of 140 points on the Ministerial list.

Data aktualizacji: 12/11/2025 - 11:50; autor zmian: Łukasz Zimny (lzimny@iitis.pl)
Data aktualizacji: 12/11/2025 - 11:49; autor zmian: Łukasz Zimny (lzimny@iitis.pl)