Vehicle Detection and Classification from High Resolution Satellite Images

Abstract. In the past decades satellite imagery has been used successfully for weather forecasting, geographical and geological applications. Low resolution satellite images are sufficient for these sorts of applications. But the technological developments in the field of satellite imaging provide high resolution sensors which expands its field of application. Thus the High Resolution Satellite Imagery (HRSI) proved to be a suitable alternative to aerial photogrammetric data to provide a new data source for object detection. Since the traffic rates in developing countries are enormously increasing, vehicle detection from satellite data will be a better choice for automating such systems. In this work, a novel technique for vehicle detection from the images obtained from high resolution sensors is proposed. Though we are using high resolution images, vehicles are seen only as tiny spots, difficult to distinguish from the background. But we are able to obtain a detection rate not less than 0.9. Thereafter we classify the detected vehicles into cars and trucks and find the count of them.