Joint Instance Segmentation and Geometric Attribute Regression for Roof Structures in Aerial Imagery

Abstract

We present a method for jointly predicting instance-level roof segment masks together with three continuous geometric attributes -- building height, roof slope, and roof azimuth -- from a single aerial orthophoto. Our approach extends Mask R-CNN with a dedicated attribute regression branch and introduces two key innovations: a conditional azimuth loss that suppresses supervision for flat roof segments where azimuth labels are inherently noisy, and a log-normalized height representation that addresses the heavily skewed distribution of building heights. We train and evaluate on a large-scale dataset of Dutch aerial images paired with automatically derived ground truth from 3DBAG, a nationwide LiDAR-based 3D building dataset. Using a DINOv3 ConvNeXt-Base backbone, our method achieves a mean absolute error of approximately 4 degrees for roof slope, 7 degrees for azimuth, and 1 meter for building height, with an instance segmentation AP$_{50}$ of 0.566. The predicted per-segment masks and attributes are sufficient to reconstruct simplified 3D building models (LoD2) from a single overhead image, requiring expensive 3D reference data only for training.