EOVNet: Earth-Observation Image-Based Vehicle Detection Network

Vehicle detection from earth-observation (EO) image has been attracting remarkable attention for its critical value in a variety of applications. Encouraged by the stunning success of deep learning techniques based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which have revolutionized the visual data processing community and obtained the state-of-the-art performance in a variety of classification and recognition tasks on benchmark datasets, we propose a network, called EOVNet (EO image-based vehicle detection network), to bridge the gap between the advanced deep learning research of object detection and the specific task of vehicle detection in EO images. Our network has integrated nearly all advanced techniques including very deep residual networks for feature extraction, feature pyramid to fuse multiscale features, network for proposal generation with feature sharing, and hard example mining. Moreover, our novel designs of probability-based localization and homography-based data augmentation have been investigated, resulting in further improvement of the detection performance. For performance evaluation, we have collected nearly all the representative EO datasets associated with vehicle detection. Extensive experiments on the representative datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art object detection approach Faster R-CNN++ (which is based on the Faster R-CNN framework, but with significant improvement) with 5% average precision improvement. The source code will be made available after the review process.