  Building footprint information is an essential ingredient for 3-D
reconstruction of urban models. The automatic generation of building footprints
from satellite images presents a considerable challenge due to the complexity
of building shapes. In this work, we have proposed improved generative
adversarial networks (GANs) for the automatic generation of building footprints
from satellite images. We used a conditional GAN with a cost function derived
from the Wasserstein distance and added a gradient penalty term. The achieved
results indicated that the proposed method can significantly improve the
quality of building footprint generation compared to conditional generative
adversarial networks, the U-Net, and other networks. In addition, our method
nearly removes all hyperparameters tuning.
