# A diverse large-scale building dataset and a novel plug-and-play domain generalization method for building extraction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.10004 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10004/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 72 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Aug 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [TransUNet: Transformers Make Strong Encoders for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04306/) (2021)
- [Spatial Transformer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02025/) (2015)
- [Dual Attention Network for Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02983/) (2018)
- [Deeper, Broader and Artier Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03077/) (2017)
- [Playing for Data: Ground Truth from Computer Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.02192/) (2016)
- [Learning to Generalize: Meta-Learning for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03463/) (2017)
- [Domain Generalization via Invariant Feature Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.2115/) (2013)
- [Deep Transfer Learning with Joint Adaptation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.06636/) (2016)
- [Domain Generalization with MixStyle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02008/) (2021)
- [FDA: Fourier Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05498/) (2020)
- [Domain Generalization by Solving Jigsaw Puzzles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.06864/) (2019)
- [Return of Frustratingly Easy Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.05547/) (2015)
- [Two at Once: Enhancing Learning and Generalization Capacities via IBN-Net](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.09441/) (2018)
- [Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images: A Survey and A New Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00133/) (2019)
- [Domain Randomization and Pyramid Consistency: Simulation-to-Real Generalization without Accessing Target Domain Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00889/) (2019)
- [RobustNet: Improving Domain Generalization in Urban-Scene Segmentation via Instance Selective Whitening](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15597/) (2021)
- [Domain Generalization Using a Mixture of Multiple Latent Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07661/) (2019)
- [Learning Texture Invariant Representation for Domain Adaptation of Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00867/) (2020)
- [Demystifying Neural Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.01036/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [CrossEarth: Geospatial Vision Foundation Model for Domain Generalizable Remote Sensing Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.22629/) (2024)
- [BuildMapper: A Fully Learnable Framework for Vectorized Building Contour Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03373/) (2022)
- [OpenRSD: Towards Open-prompts for Object Detection in Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06146/) (2025)
- [IRSAMap:Towards Large-Scale, High-Resolution Land Cover Map Vectorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.16272/) (2025)
- [Earth-OneVision: Extending Remote Sensing Multimodal Large Language Models to More Sensor Modalities and Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.10819/) (2026)
- [SChanger: Change Detection from a Semantic Change and Spatial Consistency Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20734/) (2025)
- [A Quantitative Evaluation Framework for Explainable AI in Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.24414/) (2025)
- [PCFootprint: A Large-Scale Dataset and Benchmark for Vectorized Building Footprint Extraction from Aerial LiDAR Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.20455/) (2026)
- [PolyTopoBench: A Benchmark for Complex Vector Polygon Generation from Remote Sensing Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.32856/) (2026)
- [UniBuild: Unified Building Mapping From Multi-Source Optical Remote Sensing Imagery With Detail Decoding and Geometry Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.37031/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we introduce a new building dataset and propose a novel domain generalization method to facilitate the development of building extraction from high-resolution remote sensing images. The problem with the current building datasets involves that they lack diversity, the quality of the labels is unsatisfactory, and they are hardly used to train a building extraction model with good generalization ability, so as to properly evaluate the real performance of a model in practical scenes. To address these issues, we built a diverse, large-scale, and high-quality building dataset named the WHU-Mix building dataset, which is more practice-oriented. The WHU-Mix building dataset consists of a training/validation set containing 43,727 diverse images collected from all over the world, and a test set containing 8402 images from five other cities on five continents. In addition, to further improve the generalization ability of a building extraction model, we propose a domain generalization method named batch style mixing (BSM), which can be embedded as an efficient plug-and-play module in the frond-end of a building extraction model, providing the model with a progressively larger data distribution to learn data-invariant knowledge. The experiments conducted in this study confirmed the potential of the WHU-Mix building dataset to improve the performance of a building extraction model, resulting in a 6-36% improvement in mIoU, compared to the other existing datasets. The adverse impact of the inaccurate labels in the other datasets can cause about 20% IoU decrease. The experiments also confirmed the high performance of the proposed BSM module in enhancing the generalization ability and robustness of a model, exceeding the baseline model without domain generalization by 13% and the recent domain generalization methods by 4-15% in mIoU.