PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT OF OBJECT DETECTION FROM MULTI SATELLITES AND AERIAL IMAGES

Abstract. Object detection in remote sensing imagery plays an important role in many applications, such as tracking and change detection. With the development of deep learning algorithms and advancement in hardware systems, improved accuracies have been achieved in the detection of various objects from remote sensing images. However, object detection across heterogeneous remote sensing imagery remains an important issue, particularly for satellite and aerial imagery. The colour variation for the same ground objects, variable resolutions, different platform heights, the parallax effect, and image distortion brought on by diverse shooting angles are the biggest hurdles in satellite-aerial detection applications. The research aims to obtain successful model for detecting aircrafts from satellite and aerial images and reduce cost and the gap of revisit time between sensors. The networks were tested using aerial, GF-2, Jilin-1 (JL-1) and Pleiades satellites test sets after being trained individually using the RGB high-resolution aerial set and panchromatic low-resolution GF-2 satellite set to validate the efficiency of the trained models. Also, the aerial-trained model and GF-2 satellite-trained model as dedicated models were compared with each other, and model trained by all dataset for Object Detection in Aerial Images (DOTA). It is observed that the anchor sizes and augmentation methods can enhance the performance of detection models. k-means algorithm and data augmentation were applied to produce better anchor box selection and avoid overfitting, atmospheric conditions problems, respectively. The accuracy assessment results demonstrate that the aerial-trained model outperforms the GF-2 satellite-trained model. In addition, the results of two dedicated detection models show improved accuracy compared to the DOTA-trained model.