Urban building segmentation is a prevalent research domain for very high resolution (VHR) remote sensing; however, various appearances and complicated background of VHR remote sensing imagery make accurate semantic segmentation of urban buildings a challenge in relevant applications. Following the basic architecture of U-Net, an end-to-end deep convolutional neural network (denoted as DeepResUnet) was proposed, which can effectively perform urban building segmentation at pixel scale from VHR imagery and generate accurate segmentation results. The method contains two sub-networks: One is a cascade down-sampling network for extracting feature maps of buildings from the VHR image, and the other is an up-sampling network for reconstructing those extracted feature maps back to the same size of the input VHR image. The deep residual learning approach was adopted to facilitate training in order to alleviate the degradation problem that often occurred in the model training process. The proposed DeepResUnet was tested with aerial images with a spatial resolution of 0.075 m and was compared in performance under the exact same conditions with six other state-of-the-art networks-FCN-8s, SegNet, DeconvNet, U-Net, ResUNet and DeepUNet. Results of extensive experiments indicated that the proposed DeepResUnet outperformed the other six existing networks in semantic segmentation of urban buildings in terms of visual and quantitative evaluation, especially in labeling irregular-shape and small-size buildings with higher accuracy and entirety. Compared with the U-Net, the F1 score, Kappa coefficient and overall accuracy of DeepResUnet were improved by 3.52%, 4.67% and 1.72%, respectively. Moreover, the proposed DeepResUnet required much fewer parameters than the U-Net, highlighting its significant improvement among U-Net applications. Nevertheless, the inference time of DeepResUnet is slightly longer than that of the U-Net, which is subject to further improvement.
a b s t r a c tLand price plays an important role in guiding land resource allocation for urban planning and development, particularly in big cities of fast developing countries where infrastructures and populations change frequently. Therefore, detecting spatially implicit information in the spatial pattern of relationships between land price and related impact factors is critical. Geographically weighted regression (GWR) analysis was conducted in this study for the purpose in Wuhan, China, by using a 10-year panel data set of residential land price. Based on twelve factors in three aspects (land attributes, location factors and neighborhood attributes), an evaluation index system of resident land price was established. The spatial distributions of estimated coefficients and pseudo t-values of three major explanatory variables (floor area ratio, distance to nearest center business district (CBD) and distance to nearest lake), obtained from GWR analysis, indicated that their relationships of the impact factors with land price are spatially non-stationary. The positive impact of floor area ratio on land price is more significant in highly developed areas than in less developed areas. Conversely, the negative impact of distance to nearest CBD on land price is larger in highly developed areas than in less developed areas. Moreover, wealthier dwellers may be willing to pay a higher price for a good lake view (especially views of small lakes), but infrastructure barriers (near some large lakes) cause negative effect. The outputs of this study, which provide detailed information on the relationships between land price and impact factors in local areas, are promising for urban planners to scientifically evaluate land price and make area-specific strategies.
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