Building Extraction from Remote Sensing Imagery under Hazy and Low-light Conditions: Benchmark and Baseline

arXiv cs.CV / 4/17/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper addresses how building extraction from optical remote sensing imagery degrades in real-world hazy and low-light conditions, where existing benchmarks and methods largely assume clear weather.
  • It introduces HaLoBuilding, the first optical benchmark tailored to hazy and low-light building extraction, using same-scene multitemporal pairing to achieve pixel-level label alignment under severe degradation.
  • It proposes HaLoBuild-Net, an end-to-end framework that uses a Spatial-Frequency Focus Module (SFFM), a Global Multi-scale Guidance Module (GMGM), and a Mutual-Guided Fusion Module (MGFM) to counter meteorological interference and improve boundary clarity.
  • Experiments show HaLoBuild-Net significantly outperforms state-of-the-art and restoration-segmentation baselines on the HaLoBuilding dataset while retaining strong generalization to WHU, INRIA, and LoveDA.
  • The dataset and source code are released publicly, enabling further research and benchmarking for adverse-condition remote sensing segmentation.

Abstract

Building extraction from optical Remote Sensing (RS) imagery suffers from performance degradation under real-world hazy and low-light conditions. However, existing optical methods and benchmarks focus primarily on ideal clear-weather conditions. While SAR offers all-weather sensing, its side-looking geometry causes geometric distortions. To address these challenges, we introduce HaLoBuilding, the first optical benchmark specifically designed for building extraction under hazy and low-light conditions. By leveraging a same-scene multitemporal pairing strategy, we ensure pixel-level label alignment and high fidelity even under extreme degradation. Building upon this benchmark, we propose HaLoBuild-Net, a novel end-to-end framework for building extraction in adverse RS scenarios. At its core, we develop a Spatial-Frequency Focus Module (SFFM) to effectively mitigate meteorological interference on building features by coupling large receptive field attention with frequency-aware channel reweighting guided by stable low-frequency anchors. Additionally, a Global Multi-scale Guidance Module (GMGM) provides global semantic constraints to anchor building topologies, while a Mutual-Guided Fusion Module (MGFM) implements bidirectional semantic-spatial calibration to suppress shallow noise and sharpen weather-induced blurred boundaries. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HaLoBuild-Net significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods and conventional cascaded restoration-segmentation paradigms on the HaLoBuilding dataset, while maintaining robust generalization on WHU, INRIA, and LoveDA datasets. The source code and datasets are publicly available at: https://github.com/AeroVILab-AHU/HaLoBuilding.