Synthetic Data Matters: Retraining With Geo-Typical Synthetic Labels for Building Detection

Deep learning has significantly advanced building segmentation in remote sensing, yet models struggle to generalize on data of diverse geographic regions due to variations in city layouts and the distribution of building types, sizes, and locations. However, the amount of time-consuming annotated data for capturing worldwide diversity may never catch up with the demands of increasingly data-hungry models. Thus, we propose a novel approach: retraining models at test time using synthetic data tailored to the target region’s city layout. This method generates geo-typical synthetic data that closely replicates the urban structure of a target area by leveraging geospatial data such as street networks from OpenStreetMap. Using procedural modeling and physics-based rendering, very high-resolution (VHR) synthetic images are created, incorporating domain randomization (DR) in building shapes, materials, and environmental illumination. This enables the generation of virtually unlimited training samples that maintain the essential characteristics of the target environment. To overcome synthetic-to-real domain gaps, our approach integrates geo-typical data into an adversarial domain adaptation (DA) framework for building segmentation. Experiments demonstrate significant performance enhancements, with median improvements of up to 12%, depending on the domain gap. This scalable and cost-effective method blends partial geographic knowledge with synthetic imagery, providing a promising solution to the “model collapse” issue in purely synthetic datasets. It offers a practical pathway to improving generalization in remote sensing building segmentation without extensive real-world annotations. The code is available at: https://github.com/GDAOSU/geotypical_synthetic_label_building_detection