Monocular Building Height Estimation from PhiSat-2 Imagery: Dataset and Method

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new dataset and a novel neural network method for estimating building heights from PhiSat-2 satellite imagery, demonstrating improved accuracy and robustness.

Contribution

It constructs the first PhiSat-2-based building height dataset and proposes TSONet, a two-stream network with modules for footprint-aware feature interaction and ordinal height refinement.

Findings

TSONet reduces MAE and RMSE by over 13% and 9.7% respectively.

TSONet improves IoU and F1-score by over 14% and 10%.

PhiSat-2 imagery enhances monocular building height estimation.

Abstract

Monocular building height estimation from optical imagery is important for urban morphology characterization but remains challenging due to ambiguous height cues, large inter-city variations in building morphology, and the long-tailed distribution of building heights. PhiSat-2 is a promising open-access data source for this task because of its global coverage, 4.75 m spatial resolution, and seven-band spectral observations, yet its potential has not been systematically evaluated. To address this gap, we construct a PhiSat-2-Height dataset (PHDataset) and propose a Two-Stream Ordinal Network (TSONet). PHDataset contains 9,475 co-registered image-label patch pairs from 26 cities worldwide. TSONet jointly models footprint segmentation and height estimation, and introduces a Cross-Stream Exchange Module (CSEM) and a Feature-Enhanced Bin Refinement (FEBR) module for footprint-aware feature interaction and ordinal height refinement. Experiments on PHDataset show that TSONet achieves the best overall performance, reducing MAE and RMSE by 13.2% and 9.7%, and improving IoU and F1-score by 14.0% and 10.1% over the strongest competing results. Ablation studies further verify the effectiveness of CSEM, FEBR, and the joint use of ordinal regression and footprint assistance. Additional analyses and patch-level comparison with publicly available building height products indicate that PhiSat-2 benefits monocular building height estimation through its balanced combination of building-relevant spatial detail and multispectral observations. Overall, this study confirms the potential of PhiSat-2 for monocular building height estimation and provides a dedicated dataset and an effective method for future research.