A Lightweight YOLOv13-G Framework for High-Precision Building Instance Segmentation in Complex UAV Scenes
Abstract
Accurate building instance segmentation from UAV imagery remains a challenging task due to significant scale variations, complex backgrounds, and frequent occlusions. To tackle these issues, this paper proposes an improved lightweight YOLOv13-G-based framework for building extraction in UAV imagery. The backbone network is enhanced by incorporating cross-stage lightweight connections and dilated convolutions, which improve multi-scale feature representation and expand the receptive field with minimal computational cost. Furthermore, a coordinate attention mechanism and an adaptive feature fusion module are introduced to enhance spatial awareness and dynamically balance multi-level features. Extensive experiments on a large-scale dataset, which includes both public benchmarks and real UAV images, demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior segmentation accuracy with a mean intersection over union of 93.12% and real-time inference speed of 38.46 frames per second while maintaining a compact Model size of 5.66 MB. Ablation studies and cross-dataset experiments further validate the effectiveness and generalization capability of the framework, highlighting its strong potential for practical UAV-based urban applications.
Fields of Study & Subjects
Automated Road and Building Extraction
Advanced Neural Network Applications
Infrastructure Maintenance and Monitoring
Publication details
- Journal / source
- Buildings
- Volume
- 16
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 559–559
- Publication date
- 29 January 2026
- Language
- EN