Multisized Object Detection Using Spaceborne Optical Imagery

This article addresses the highly challenging problem of vehicle detection from high-resolution remote sensing imagery by introducing a novel medium size annotated dataset named satellite imagery multivehicles dataset (SIMD) along with an adapted single pass deep multiscale object detection framework with the aim to detect multisized/type objects for catering above-ground perspective of vehicles. The dataset images are acquired from multiple locations in the EU/US regions available in the public Google Earth satellite imagery. Specifically, it comprises 5000 images of resolution 1024 × 768 and collectively contains 45 096 objects in 15 different classes of vehicles including cars, trucks, buses, long vehicles, various types of aircrafts, and boats. In the proposed architecture, we demonstrate the relevant modifications needed to translate the state-of-the-art object detection frameworks to solve the object detection problem from remote sensing imagery. The proposed architecture has been evaluated on SIMD and a public dataset VEDAI. The comparative analysis has been performed with existing off-the-shelf single-shot object detection models including YOLO and YOLT yielding superior performance measured with standard evaluation strategies. To ignite further research in this domain, the introduced SIMD dataset and the corresponding architecture is publicly available at this link: http://vision.seecs.edu.pk/simd.