Which Airline is This? Airline Logo Detection in Real-World Weather Conditions

The detection of logos in images, for instance, logos of airlines on airplane tails, is a difficult task in real-world weather conditions. Most systems used for logo detection are very good at detecting logos in clean images. However, they exhibit problems when images are degraded by effects of adverse weather conditions as they frequently occur in real-world scenarios. For investigating this problem on airline logo detection as a subproblem of logo detection, we first present a new dataset for airline logo detection on airplane tails containing a test split with images degraded by adverse weather effects. Second, to handle the detection of airline logos effectively, a new two-stage airline logo detection system based on a state-of-the-art object proposal generation system and a specifically tailored classifier is proposed. Finally, improving the results on images degraded by adverse weather effects, we introduce a learning-free application-agnostic data augmentation strategy simulating effects like rain and fog. The results show the superior performance of our airline logo detection system compared to state-of-the-art. Furthermore, applying our data augmentation approach to a variety of systems, reduces the significant drop in performance on degraded images.