Extracting Small Flying Airplane With Spatially Accurate and Temporally Consistent Foreground Modeling

Extracting the flying airplane from the satellite video has received a great deal of attention in remote sensing applications. Nevertheless, the challenge arises in two aspects: the limited spatial resolution of space-borne imaging devices and the small size of the airplane with low contrast to the background. This article presents a novel spatially accurate and temporally consistent model for foreground airplane extraction. Specifically, each frame is decomposed as a linear combination of the airplane and background with a kind of mixture ratios. This enables a more accurate spatial representation of the small airplane of low resolution. Then, the airplanes from different frames obey the common mixture ratios based on the subpixel motion estimation. This enables the temporally consistent extraction through frames. The effectiveness of our method is demonstrated by the qualitative and quantitative evaluation of both synthetic and real data.