Deep Learning for Vehicle Detection in Aerial Images

The detection of vehicles in aerial images is widely applied in many domains. In this paper, we propose a novel double focal loss convolutional neural network framework (DFL-CNN). In the proposed framework, the skip connection is used in the CNN structure to enhance the feature learning. Also, the focal loss function is used to substitute for conventional cross entropy loss function in both of the region proposed network and the final classifier. We further introduce the first large-scale vehicle detection dataset ITCVD with ground truth annotations for all the vehicles in the scene. The experimental results show that our DFL-CNN outperforms the baselines on vehicle detection.