Vehicle detection from high-resolution aerial images based on superpixel and color name features

Abstract

Automatic vehicle detection from aerial images is emerging due to the strong demand of large-area traffic monitoring. In this paper, we present a novel framework for automatic vehicle detection from the aerial images. Through superpixel segmentation, we first segment the aerial images into homogeneous patches, which consist of the basic units during the detection to improve efficiency. By introducing the sparse representation into our method, powerful classification ability is achieved after the dictionary training. To effectively describe a patch, the Histogram of Oriented Gradient (HOG) is used. We further propose to integrate color information to enrich the feature representation by using the color name feature. The final feature consists of both HOG and color name based histogram, by which we get a strong descriptor of a patch. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and robust performance of the proposed algorithm for vehicle detection from aerial images.