JOURNAL OF BUILDING ENGINEERING, cilt.96, ss.1-12, 2024 (SCI-Expanded)
The building layer, one of the fundamental elements of mapping, features various layouts and
architectures and is used in many mapping activities, such as urban planning, property management, illegal building detection, and disaster investigation. Therefore, accessing building information from remotely sensed images in a fast and automated manner is a popular topic. This
paper aims to design a new Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture called FwSVM-Net
(Fast with Support Vector Machine Network) for building extraction. The FwSVM-Net, with 16
convolutional layers, employs a fusion mechanism to reduce the semantic gap between the
encoder and decoder sections. In the architecture’s classification layer, a Support Vector Machine
(SVM) is used to increase segmentation accuracy while reducing parameter density. The Massachusetts Building Dataset was used for the automatic building extraction from aerial images. The
performance of the FwSVM-Net on the test data was calculated at 97 %, 91 %, 87 %, 89 %, and
86 % for Overall Accuracy (OA), Precision (Pr), Recall (Rc), F1-Score (F1), and Intersection over
Union (IoU), respectively. FwSVM-Net shows approximately ±2 % similarity in accuracy with the
U-Net architecture, which is trained and evaluated with the same dataset. Despite this, the fact
that the FwSVM-Net completed the training process approximately twice as fast as the U-Net
architecture provides a significant time advantage. As a result, it is predicted that the FwSVM-Net
will offer speed and convenience in terms of usability because of its performance, which is
equivalent to the performance of the U-Net architecture for segmentation, and its time advantage.