scholarly journals Small Object Detection from Remote Sensing Images with the Help of Object-Focused Super-Resolution Using Wasserstein GANs

Author(s):  
Luc Courtrai ◽  
Minh-Tan Pham ◽  
Chloe Friguet ◽  
Sebastien Lefevre
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (19) ◽  
pp. 3152
Author(s):  
Luc Courtrai ◽  
Minh-Tan Pham ◽  
Sébastien Lefèvre

This article tackles the problem of detecting small objects in satellite or aerial remote sensing images by relying on super-resolution to increase image spatial resolution, thus the size and details of objects to be detected. We show how to improve the super-resolution framework starting from the learning of a generative adversarial network (GAN) based on residual blocks and then its integration into a cycle model. Furthermore, by adding to the framework an auxiliary network tailored for object detection, we considerably improve the learning and the quality of our final super-resolution architecture, and more importantly increase the object detection performance. Besides the improvement dedicated to the network architecture, we also focus on the training of super-resolution on target objects, leading to an object-focused approach. Furthermore, the proposed strategies do not depend on the choice of a baseline super-resolution framework, hence could be adopted for current and future state-of-the-art models. Our experimental study on small vehicle detection in remote sensing data conducted on both aerial and satellite images (i.e., ISPRS Potsdam and xView datasets) confirms the effectiveness of the improved super-resolution methods to assist with the small object detection tasks.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (9) ◽  
pp. 1854
Author(s):  
Syed Muhammad Arsalan Bashir ◽  
Yi Wang

This paper deals with detecting small objects in remote sensing images from satellites or any aerial vehicle by utilizing the concept of image super-resolution for image resolution enhancement using a deep-learning-based detection method. This paper provides a rationale for image super-resolution for small objects by improving the current super-resolution (SR) framework by incorporating a cyclic generative adversarial network (GAN) and residual feature aggregation (RFA) to improve detection performance. The novelty of the method is threefold: first, a framework is proposed, independent of the final object detector used in research, i.e., YOLOv3 could be replaced with Faster R-CNN or any object detector to perform object detection; second, a residual feature aggregation network was used in the generator, which significantly improved the detection performance as the RFA network detected complex features; and third, the whole network was transformed into a cyclic GAN. The image super-resolution cyclic GAN with RFA and YOLO as the detection network is termed as SRCGAN-RFA-YOLO, which is compared with the detection accuracies of other methods. Rigorous experiments on both satellite images and aerial images (ISPRS Potsdam, VAID, and Draper Satellite Image Chronology datasets) were performed, and the results showed that the detection performance increased by using super-resolution methods for spatial resolution enhancement; for an IoU of 0.10, AP of 0.7867 was achieved for a scale factor of 16.


Author(s):  
Jakaria Rabbi ◽  
Nilanjan Ray ◽  
Matthias Schubert ◽  
Subir Chowdhury ◽  
Dennis Chao

The detection performance of small objects in remote sensing images is not satisfactory compared to large objects, especially in low-resolution and noisy images. A generative adversarial network (GAN)-based model called enhanced super-resolution GAN (ESRGAN) shows remarkable image enhancement performance, but reconstructed images miss high-frequency edge information. Therefore, object detection performance degrades for the small objects on recovered noisy and low-resolution remote sensing images. Inspired by the success of edge enhanced GAN (EEGAN) and ESRGAN, we apply a new edge-enhanced super-resolution GAN (EESRGAN) to improve the image quality of remote sensing images and used different detector networks in an end-to-end manner where detector loss is backpropagated into the EESRGAN to improve the detection performance. We propose an architecture with three components: ESRGAN, Edge Enhancement Network (EEN), and Detection network. We use residual-in-residual dense blocks (RRDB) for both the GAN and EEN, and for the detector network, we use the faster region-based convolutional network (FRCNN) (two-stage detector) and single-shot multi-box detector (SSD) (one stage detector). Extensive experiments on car overhead with context and oil and gas storage tank (created by us) data sets show superior performance of our method compared to the standalone state-of-the-art object detectors.


Author(s):  
Jakaria Rabbi ◽  
Nilanjan Ray ◽  
Matthias Schubert ◽  
Subir Chowdhury ◽  
Dennis Chao

The detection performance of small objects in remote sensing images is not satisfactory compared to large objects, especially in low-resolution and noisy images. A generative adversarial network (GAN)-based model called enhanced super-resolution GAN (ESRGAN) shows remarkable image enhancement performance, but reconstructed images miss high-frequency edge information. Therefore, object detection performance degrades for small objects on recovered noisy and low-resolution remote sensing images. Inspired by the success of edge enhanced GAN (EEGAN) and ESRGAN, we apply a new edge-enhanced super-resolution GAN (EESRGAN) to improve the image quality of remote sensing images and use different detector networks in an end-to-end manner where detector loss is backpropagated into the EESRGAN to improve the detection performance. We propose an architecture with three components: ESRGAN, Edge Enhancement Network (EEN), and Detection network. We use residual-in-residual dense blocks (RRDB) for both the ESRGAN and EEN, and for the detector network, we use the faster region-based convolutional network (FRCNN) (two-stage detector) and single-shot multi-box detector (SSD) (one stage detector). Extensive experiments on a public (car overhead with context) and a self-assembled (oil and gas storage tank) satellite dataset show superior performance of our method compared to the standalone state-of-the-art object detectors.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 339 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chaoyue Chen ◽  
Weiguo Gong ◽  
Yongliang Chen ◽  
Weihong Li

Object detection has attracted increasing attention in the field of remote sensing image analysis. Complex backgrounds, vertical views, and variations in target kind and size in remote sensing images make object detection a challenging task. In this work, considering that the types of objects are often closely related to the scene in which they are located, we propose a convolutional neural network (CNN) by combining scene-contextual information for object detection. Specifically, we put forward the scene-contextual feature pyramid network (SCFPN), which aims to strengthen the relationship between the target and the scene and solve problems resulting from variations in target size. Additionally, to improve the capability of feature extraction, the network is constructed by repeating a building aggregated residual block. This block increases the receptive field, which can extract richer information for targets and achieve excellent performance with respect to small object detection. Moreover, to improve the proposed model performance, we use group normalization, which divides the channels into groups and computes the mean and variance for normalization within each group, to solve the limitation of the batch normalization. The proposed method is validated on a public and challenging dataset. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art object detection models.


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