AFGL-Net: Attentive Fusion of Global and Local Deep Features for Building Facades Parsing

In this paper, we propose a deep learning framework, namely AFGL-Net to achieve building facade parsing, i.e., obtaining the semantics of small components of building facade, such as windows and doors. To this end, we present an autoencoder embedding position and direction encoding for local feature encoding. The autoencoder enhances the local feature aggregation and augments the representation of skeleton features of windows and doors. We also integrate the Transformer into AFGL-Net to infer the geometric shapes and structural arrangements of facade components and capture the global contextual features. These global features can help recognize inapparent windows/doors from the facade points corrupted with noise, outliers, occlusions, and irregularities. The attention-based feature fusion mechanism is finally employed to obtain more informative features by simultaneously considering local geometric details and the global contexts. The proposed AFGL-Net is comprehensively evaluated on Dublin and RueMonge2014 benchmarks, achieving 67.02% and 59.80% mIoU, respectively. We also demonstrate the superiority of the proposed AFGL-Net by comparing with the state-of-the-art methods and various ablation studies.