The importance of precise information about the population distribution is widely acknowledged. The census is considered the most reliable and complete source of this information, and its data are delivered in an aggregated form in sectors. These sectors are operational units with irregular shapes, which hinder the spatial analysis of the data. Thus, the transformation of sectors onto a regular grid would facilitate such analysis. A methodology to achieve this transformation could be based on remote sensing image classification to identify building where the population lives. The building detection is considered a complex task since there is a great variability of building characteristics and on the images quality themselves. The majority of methods are complex and very specialist dependent. The automatic methods require a large annotated dataset for training and they are sensitive to the image quality, to the building characteristics, and to the environment. In this thesis, we propose an automatic method for building detection based on a deep learning architecture that uses a relative small dataset with a large variability. The proposed method shows good results when compared to the state of the art. An annotated dataset has been built that covers 12 cities distributed in different regions of Brazil. Such images not only have different qualities, but also shows a large variability on the building characteristics and geographic environments. A very important application of this method is the use of the building area classification in the dasimetric methods for the population estimation into grid. The concept proof in this application showed a promising result when compared to the usual method allowing the improvement of the quality of the estimates.