SDBD: A Hierarchical Region-of-Interest Detection Approach in Large-Scale Remote Sensing Image

Abstract

Region-of-interest (ROI) detection techniques are of great importance in the analysis of remote sensing images, especially in target detection, since the size of the image to be dealt with grows substantially with the improvement of spatial resolution. Most of current studies are not aiming at the specific type of object area detection, and the processed images are rather small compared to the size of the raw data acquired by high-resolution satellite. In this letter, a hierarchical task-driven ROI detection method, based on saliency and density, is proposed to address the detection of the potential object areas in large-scale remote sensing images. The proposed saliency and density-based detection method (SDBD) integrates bottom–up and top–down strategies, where the saliency-based multilevel histogram contrast is presented in the bottom–up phase to obtain the preliminary regions, while the centroid density distribution index (CDDI) is defined in the top–down scheme to refine the previous results. Specifically, superpixel segmentation is introduced in this letter to narrow down the ROI candidates. SDBD is capable of extracting ROI of different objects by adjusting the threshold of CDDI. The experiments are conducted on two data sets to extract ROIs of storage tanks and residence. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is effective in identifying ROI in large-scale data.