An Integrated Detection and Multi-Object Tracking Pipeline for Satellite Video Analysis of Maritime and Aerial Objects

Abstract

Optical remote sensing videos, as a new source of remote sensing data that has emerged in recent years, have significant potential in remote sensing applications, especially national defense. In this paper, a tracking pipeline named TDNet (tracking while detecting based on a neural network) is proposed for optical remote sensing videos based on a correlation filter and deep neural networks. The pipeline is used to simultaneously track ships and planes in videos. There are many target tracking methods for general video data, but they suffer some difficulties in remote sensing videos with low resolution and those influenced by weather conditions. The tracked targets are usually misty. Therefore, in TDNet, we propose a new multi-target tracking method called MT-KCF and a detecting-assisted tracking (i.e., DAT) module to improve tracking accuracy and precision. Meanwhile, we also design a new target recognition (i.e., NTR) module to recognise newly emerged targets. In order to verify the performance of TDNet, we compare our method with several state-of-the-art tracking methods on optical video remote sensing data sets acquired from the Jilin No. 1 satellite. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and the state-of-the-art performance of the proposed method. The proposed method can achieve more than 90% performance in terms of precision for single-target tracking tasks and more than 85% performance in terms of MOTA for multi-object tracking tasks.