LEARNING WITH REAL-WORLD AND ARTIFICIAL DATA FOR IMPROVED VEHICLE DETECTION IN AERIAL IMAGERY

Abstract. Detecting objects in aerial images is an important task in different environmental and infrastructure-related applications. Deep learning object detectors like RetinaNet offer decent detection performance; however, they require a large amount of annotated training data. It is well known that the collection of annotated data is a time consuming and tedious task, which often cannot be performed sufficiently well for remote sensing tasks since the required data must cover a wide variety of scenes and objects. In this paper, we analyze the performance of such a network given a limited amount of training data and address the research question of whether artificially generated training data can be used to overcome the challenge of real-world data sets with a small amount of training data. For our experiments, we use the ISPRS 2D Semantic Labeling Contest Potsdam data set for vehicle detection, where we derive object-bounding boxes of vehicles suitable for our task. We generate artificial data based on vehicle blueprints and show that networks trained only on generated data may have a lower performance, but are still able to detect most of the vehicles found in the real data set. Moreover, we show that adding generated data to real-world data sets with a limited amount of training data, the performance can be increased significantly, and in some cases, almost reach baseline performance levels.