Rotation-and-scale-invariant airplane detection in high-resolution satellite images based on deep-Hough-forests

This paper proposes a rotation-and-scale-invariant method for detecting airplanes from high-resolution satellite images. To improve feature representation capability, a multi-layer feature generation model is created to produce high-order feature representations for local image patches through deep learning techniques. To effectively estimate airplane centroids, a Hough forest model is trained to learn mappings from high-order patch features to the probabilities of an airplane being present at specific locations. To handle airplanes with varying orientations, patch orientation is defined and integrated into the Hough forest to augment Hough voting. The scale invariance is achieved by using a set of scale factors embedded in the Hough forest. Quantitative evaluations on the images collected from Google Earth service show that the proposed method achieves a completeness, correctness, quality, and F1-measure of 0.968, 0.972, 0.942, and 0.970, respectively, in detecting airplanes with arbitrary orientations and sizes. Comparative studies also demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the other three existing methods in accurately and completely detecting airplanes in high-resolution remotely sensed images.