# Contextual Pyramid Attention Network for Building Segmentation in Aerial Imagery

Source: [Contextual Pyramid Attention Network for Building Segmentation in Aerial Imagery](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa675e1e209131cea15ed1>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2025-10-25T22:13:13.512Z

Authors: Clint Sebastian, Raffaele Imbriaco, Egor Bondarev, Peter H.N. de With

Published: 2020-04-15T11:36:26.000Z

## Abstract

Building extraction from aerial images has several applications in problems such as urban planning, change detection, and disaster management. With the increasing availability of data, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for semantic segmentation of remote sensing imagery has improved significantly in recent years. However, convolutions operate in local neighborhoods and fail to capture non-local features that are essential in semantic understanding of aerial images. In this work, we propose to improve building segmentation of different sizes by capturing long-range dependencies using contextual pyramid attention (CPA). The pathways process the input at multiple scales efficiently and combine them in a weighted manner, similar to an ensemble model. The proposed method obtains state-of-the-art performance on the Inria Aerial Image Labelling Dataset with minimal computation costs. Our method improves 1.8 points over current state-of-the-art methods and 12.6 points higher than existing baselines on the Intersection over Union (IoU) metric without any post-processing. Code and models will be made publicly available.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.07018>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2004.07018.pdf>)
