Object Detection in Satellite Imagery using 2-Step Convolutional Neural Networks

This paper presents an efficient object detection method from satellite imagery. Among a number of machine learning algorithms, we proposed a combination of two convolutional neural networks (CNN) aimed at high precision and high recall, respectively. We validated our models using golf courses as target objects. The proposed deep learning method demonstrated higher accuracy than previous object identification methods.

Object Detection of Satellite Images Using Multi-Channel Higher-order Local Autocorrelation

The Earth observation satellites have been monitoring the earth's surface for a long time, and the images taken by the satellites contain large amounts of valuable data. However, it is extremely hard work to manually analyze such huge data. Thus, a method of automatic object detection is needed for satellite images to facilitate efficient data analyses. This paper describes a new image feature extended from higher-order local autocorrelation to the object detection of multispectral satellite images. The feature has been extended to extract spectral inter-relationships in addition to spatial relationships to fully exploit multispectral information. The results of experiments with object detection tasks conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed feature extension indicate that the feature realized a higher performance compared to existing methods.

Solar Power Plant Detection on Multi-Spectral Satellite Imagery using Weakly-Supervised CNN with Feedback Features and m-PCNN Fusion

Most of the traditional convolutional neural networks (CNNs) implements bottom-up approach (feed-forward) for image classifications. However, many scientific studies demonstrate that visual perception in primates rely on both bottom-up and top-down connections. Therefore, in this work, we propose a CNN network with feedback structure for Solar power plant detection on middle-resolution satellite images. To express the strength of the top-down connections, we introduce feedback CNN network (FB-Net) to a baseline CNN model used for solar power plant classification on multi-spectral satellite data. Moreover, we introduce a method to improve class activation mapping (CAM) to our FB-Net, which takes advantage of multi-channel pulse coupled neural network (m-PCNN) for weakly-supervised localization of the solar power plants from the features of proposed FB-Net. For the proposed FB-Net CAM with m-PCNN, experimental results demonstrated promising results on both solar-power plant image classification and detection task.