Scene Context-Driven Vehicle Detection in High-Resolution Aerial Images

As the spatial resolution of remote sensing images is improving gradually, it is feasible to realize “scene-object” collaborative image interpretation. Unfortunately, this idea is not fully utilized in vehicle detection from high-resolution aerial images, and most of the existing methods may be promoted by considering the variability of vehicle spatial distribution in different image scenes and treating vehicle detection tasks scene-specific. With this motivation, a scene context-driven vehicle detection method is proposed in this paper. At first, we perform scene classification using the deep learning method and, then, detect vehicles in roads and parking lots separately through different vehicle detectors. Afterward, we further optimize the detection results using different postprocessing rules according to different scene types. Experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of higher detection accuracy rate and lower false alarm rate.