ISPRS Annals of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences
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Citation
Articles | Volume V-1-2022
https://doi.org/10.5194/isprs-annals-V-1-2022-15-2022
https://doi.org/10.5194/isprs-annals-V-1-2022-15-2022
17 May 2022
 | 17 May 2022

VEHICLE INSTANCE SEGMENTATION WITH ROTATED BOUNDING BOXES IN UAV IMAGES USING CNN

S. El Amrani Abouelassad and F. Rottensteiner

Keywords: Remote Sensing, Vehicle Detection, Mask RCNN, Deep Learning, Instance Segmentation

Abstract. Vehicle instance segmentation is a major but challenging task in aerial remote sensing applications. More importantly, the current majority methods use horizontal bounding boxes which does not tell much about the orientation of vehicles and often leads to inaccurate mask proposals due to high background to foreground pixel-ratio. Given that the orientation of vehicles is important for numerous applications like vehicle tracking, we introduce in this paper a deep neural network to detect and segment vehicles using rotated bounding boxes in aerial images. Our method demonstrates that rotated instance segmentation improves the mask predictions, especially when objects are not axis aligned or are touching. We evaluate our model on the ISPRS benchmark dataset and our newly introduced UAV dataset for vehicle segmentation and show that we can significantly improve the mask accuracy compared to instance segmentation using axis-aligned bounding boxes.