Convolutional Neural Network Based Automatic Object Detection on Aerial Images

We are witnessing daily acquisition of large amounts of aerial and satellite imagery. Analysis of such large quantities of data can be helpful for many practical applications. In this letter, we present an automatic content-based analysis of aerial imagery in order to detect and mark arbitrary objects or regions in high-resolution images. For that purpose, we proposed a method for automatic object detection based on a convolutional neural network. A novel two-stage approach for network training is implemented and verified in the tasks of aerial image classification and object detection. First, we tested the proposed training approach using UCMerced data set of aerial images and achieved accuracy of approximately 98.6%. Second, the method for automatic object detection was implemented and verified. For implementation on GPGPU, a required processing time for one aerial image of size 5000 × 5000 pixels was around 30 s.