Detecting Maneuvering Target Accurately Based on a Two-Phase Approach From Remote Sensing Imagery

Abstract

Maneuvering target detection in satellite images is difficult due to their small sizes, blurred appearances under various illuminations and shadows, and occlusion by trees and buildings. Recently, a fully convolutional regression network (FCRN) was proposed and achieved by the state-of-the-art performance in the Munich vehicle database. However, such a one-phase approach often makes mistakes at difficult places because of its swift glance and rejecting any second check. In this letter, a new object spatial density building net (SDBN) was designed, and a two-phase detection approach was proposed. It used the first SDBN to generate candidate regions and the second SDBN to proceed with a meticulous check on the object categories. Experiments on four maneuvering target databases, the Munich vehicle database, the Open Vehicle Database of San-Francisco (OVDS), the Overhead Imagery Research Data Set (OIRDS), and the Open Aircraft Database (OAD) show that the proposed method outperforms FCRN by an obvious margin. In addition, the accurate geometrical parameters (positions, orientations, and lengths) of all the objects were computed based on the spatial density maps, and the published experimental result of FCRN in OIRDS was pointed out and the corrected result was given. All source codes and databases are available at http://www.github.com/cxy177/SDBN .