# BuildMapper: A Fully Learnable Framework for Vectorized Building Contour Extraction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.03373 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03373/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 68 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [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)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [Deformable Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06211/) (2017)
- [Path Aggregation Network for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01534/) (2018)
- [CenterNet: Keypoint Triplets for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08189/) (2019)
- [YOLACT: Real-time Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02689/) (2019)
- [Deep Layer Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06484/) (2017)
- [Conditional Convolutions for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.05664/) (2020)
- [SOLO: Segmenting Objects by Locations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04488/) (2019)
- [PolarMask: Single Shot Instance Segmentation with Polar Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13226/) (2019)
- [Boundary IoU: Improving Object-Centric Image Segmentation Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16562/) (2021)
- [SpaceNet: A Remote Sensing Dataset and Challenge Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.01232/) (2018)
- [End-to-end people detection in crowded scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.04878/) (2015)
- [Deep Snake for Real-Time Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.01629/) (2020)
- [Fast Interactive Object Annotation with Curve-GCN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.06874/) (2019)
- [PolyTransform: Deep Polygon Transformer for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02801/) (2019)
- [Sparse Instance Activation for Real-Time Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12827/) (2022)
- [Topological Map Extraction from Overhead Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01497/) (2018)
- [Learning deep structured active contours end-to-end](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.06329/) (2018)
- [MAP-Net: Multi Attending Path Neural Network for Building Footprint Extraction from Remote Sensed Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.12060/) (2019)
- [PolarMask++: Enhanced Polar Representation for Single-Shot Instance Segmentation and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02184/) (2021)
- [E2EC: An End-to-End Contour-based Method for High-Quality High-Speed Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04074/) (2022)
- [Multi-Task Learning for Segmentation of Building Footprints with Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.05932/) (2017)
- [Machine-learned Regularization and Polygonization of Building Segmentation Masks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12587/) (2020)
- [A diverse large-scale building dataset and a novel plug-and-play domain generalization method for building extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10004/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Pix2Poly: A Sequence Prediction Method for End-to-end Polygonal Building Footprint Extraction from Remote Sensing Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07899/) (2024)
- [HiT: Building Mapping with Hierarchical Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09643/) (2023)
- [P2PFormer: A Primitive-to-polygon Method for Regular Building Contour Extraction from Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02930/) (2024)
- [IRSAMap:Towards Large-Scale, High-Resolution Land Cover Map Vectorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.16272/) (2025)
- [Data Leakage Detection and De-duplication in Large Scale Geospatial Image Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02296/) (2023)
- [Global Collinearity-aware Polygonizer for Polygonal Building Mapping in Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.01385/) (2025)
- [ObliCity: A Benchmark and Baseline for Roof-to-Ground Projection Displacement Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.25210/) (2026)
- [SuperpixelGraph: Semi-automatic generation of building footprint through semantic-sensitive superpixel and neural graph networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05661/) (2023)
- [A Novel Shape Guided Transformer Network for Instance Segmentation in Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00360/) (2024)
- [PolyBuild: An End-to-End Method for Polygonal Building Contour Extraction from High-Resolution Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.08920/) (2026)
- [PCFootprint: A Large-Scale Dataset and Benchmark for Vectorized Building Footprint Extraction from Aerial LiDAR Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.20455/) (2026)
- [LoDEOT: Low-Dimensional and Efficient Offset Tokens for Building Footprint Extraction from Off-Nadir Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.05899/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deep learning based methods have significantly boosted the study of automatic building extraction from remote sensing images. However, delineating vectorized and regular building contours like a human does remains very challenging, due to the difficulty of the methodology, the diversity of building structures, and the imperfect imaging conditions. In this paper, we propose the first end-to-end learnable building contour extraction framework, named BuildMapper, which can directly and efficiently delineate building polygons just as a human does. BuildMapper consists of two main components: 1) a contour initialization module that generates initial building contours; and 2) a contour evolution module that performs both contour vertex deformation and reduction, which removes the need for complex empirical post-processing used in existing methods. In both components, we provide new ideas, including a learnable contour initialization method to replace the empirical methods, dynamic predicted and ground truth vertex pairing for the static vertex correspondence problem, and a lightweight encoder for vertex information extraction and aggregation, which benefit a general contour-based method; and a well-designed vertex classification head for building corner vertices detection, which casts light on direct structured building contour extraction. We also built a suitable large-scale building dataset, the WHU-Mix (vector) building dataset, to benefit the study of contour-based building extraction methods. The extensive experiments conducted on the WHU-Mix (vector) dataset, the WHU dataset, and the CrowdAI dataset verified that BuildMapper can achieve a state-of-the-art performance, with a higher mask average precision (AP) and boundary AP than both segmentation-based and contour-based methods.