Vehicle Detection in Aerial Images Based on Region Convolutional Neural Networks and Hard Negative Example Mining.

Detecting vehicles in aerial imagery plays an important role in a wide range of applications. The current vehicle detection methods are mostly based on sliding-window search and handcrafted or shallow-learning-based features, having limited description capability and heavy computational costs. Recently, due to the powerful feature representations, region convolutional neural networks (CNN) based detection methods have achieved state-of-the-art performance in computer vision, especially Faster R-CNN. However, directly using it for vehicle detection in aerial images has many limitations: (1) region proposal network (RPN) in Faster R-CNN has poor performance for accurately locating small-sized vehicles, due to the relatively coarse feature maps; and (2) the classifier after RPN cannot distinguish vehicles and complex backgrounds well. In this study, an improved detection method based on Faster R-CNN is proposed in order to accomplish the two challenges mentioned above. Firstly, to improve the recall, we employ a hyper region proposal network (HRPN) to extract vehicle-like targets with a combination of hierarchical feature maps. Then, we replace the classifier after RPN by a cascade of boosted classifiers to verify the candidate regions, aiming at reducing false detection by negative example mining. We evaluate our method on the Munich vehicle dataset and the collected vehicle dataset, with improvements in accuracy and robustness compared to existing methods.

Synthetic Aperture Radar Target Recognition with Feature Fusion Based on a Stacked Autoencoder.

Feature extraction is a crucial step for any automatic target recognition process, especially in the interpretation of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery. In order to obtain distinctive features, this paper proposes a feature fusion algorithm for SAR target recognition based on a stacked autoencoder (SAE). The detailed procedure presented in this paper can be summarized as follows: firstly, 23 baseline features and Three-Patch Local Binary Pattern (TPLBP) features are extracted. These features can describe the global and local aspects of the image with less redundancy and more complementarity, providing richer information for feature fusion. Secondly, an effective feature fusion network is designed. Baseline and TPLBP features are cascaded and fed into a SAE. Then, with an unsupervised learning algorithm, the SAE is pre-trained by greedy layer-wise training method. Capable of feature expression, SAE makes the fused features more distinguishable. Finally, the model is fine-tuned by a softmax classifier and applied to the classification of targets. 10-class SAR targets based on Moving and Stationary Target Acquisition and Recognition (MSTAR) dataset got a classification accuracy up to 95.43%, which verifies the effectiveness of the presented algorithm.

A Fast Superpixel Segmentation Algorithm for PolSAR Images Based on Edge Refinement and Revised Wishart Distance.

The superpixel segmentation algorithm, as a preprocessing technique, should show good performance in fast segmentation speed, accurate boundary adherence and homogeneous regularity. A fast superpixel segmentation algorithm by iterative edge refinement (IER) works well on optical images. However, it may generate poor superpixels for Polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) images due to the influence of strong speckle noise and many small-sized or slim regions. To solve these problems, we utilized a fast revised Wishart distance instead of Euclidean distance in the local relabeling of unstable pixels, and initialized unstable pixels as all the pixels substituted for the initial grid edge pixels in the initialization step. Then, postprocessing with the dissimilarity measure is employed to remove the generated small isolated regions as well as to preserve strong point targets. Finally, the superiority of the proposed algorithm is validated with extensive experiments on four simulated and two real-world PolSAR images from Experimental Synthetic Aperture Radar (ESAR) and Airborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (AirSAR) data sets, which demonstrate that the proposed method shows better performance with respect to several commonly used evaluation measures, even with about nine times higher computational efficiency, as well as fine boundary adherence and strong point targets preservation, compared with three state-of-the-art methods.

An Adaptive Ship Detection Scheme for Spaceborne SAR Imagery.

With the rapid development of spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and the increasing need of ship detection, research on adaptive ship detection in spaceborne SAR imagery is of great importance. Focusing on practical problems of ship detection, this paper presents a highly adaptive ship detection scheme for spaceborne SAR imagery. It is able to process a wide range of sensors, imaging modes and resolutions. Two main stages are identified in this paper, namely: ship candidate detection and ship discrimination. Firstly, this paper proposes an adaptive land masking method using ship size and pixel size. Secondly, taking into account the imaging mode, incidence angle, and polarization channel of SAR imagery, it implements adaptive ship candidate detection in spaceborne SAR imagery by applying different strategies to different resolution SAR images. Finally, aiming at different types of typical false alarms, this paper proposes a comprehensive ship discrimination method in spaceborne SAR imagery based on confidence level and complexity analysis. Experimental results based on RADARSAT-1, RADARSAT-2, TerraSAR-X, RS-1, and RS-3 images demonstrate that the adaptive scheme proposed in this paper is able to detect ship targets in a fast, efficient and robust way.

A Likelihood-Based SLIC Superpixel Algorithm for SAR Images Using Generalized Gamma Distribution.

The simple linear iterative clustering (SLIC) method is a recently proposed popular superpixel algorithm. However, this method may generate bad superpixels for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images due to effects of speckle and the large dynamic range of pixel intensity. In this paper, an improved SLIC algorithm for SAR images is proposed. This algorithm exploits the likelihood information of SAR image pixel clusters. Specifically, a local clustering scheme combining intensity similarity with spatial proximity is proposed. Additionally, for post-processing, a local edge-evolving scheme that combines spatial context and likelihood information is introduced as an alternative to the connected components algorithm. To estimate the likelihood information of SAR image clusters, we incorporated a generalized gamma distribution (GГD). Finally, the superiority of the proposed algorithm was validated using both simulated and real-world SAR images.

Extended emitter target tracking using GM-PHD filter.

If equipped with several radar emitters, a target will produce more than one measurement per time step and is denoted as an extended target. However, due to the requirement of all possible measurement set partitions, the exact probability hypothesis density filter for extended target tracking is computationally intractable. To reduce the computational burden, a fast partitioning algorithm based on hierarchy clustering is proposed in this paper. It combines the two most similar cells to obtain new partitions step by step. The pseudo-likelihoods in the Gaussian-mixture probability hypothesis density filter can then be computed iteratively. Furthermore, considering the additional measurement information from the emitter target, the signal feature is also used in partitioning the measurement set to improve the tracking performance. The simulation results show that the proposed method can perform better with lower computational complexity in scenarios with different clutter densities.

Sparse representation based SAR vehicle recognition along with aspect angle.

As a method of representing the test sample with few training samples from an overcomplete dictionary, sparse representation classification (SRC) has attracted much attention in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) automatic target recognition (ATR) recently. In this paper, we develop a novel SAR vehicle recognition method based on sparse representation classification along with aspect information (SRCA), in which the correlation between the vehicle's aspect angle and the sparse representation vector is exploited. The detailed procedure presented in this paper can be summarized as follows. Initially, the sparse representation vector of a test sample is solved by sparse representation algorithm with a principle component analysis (PCA) feature-based dictionary. Then, the coefficient vector is projected onto a sparser one within a certain range of the vehicle's aspect angle. Finally, the vehicle is classified into a certain category that minimizes the reconstruction error with the novel sparse representation vector. Extensive experiments are conducted on the moving and stationary target acquisition and recognition (MSTAR) dataset and the results demonstrate that the proposed method performs robustly under the variations of depression angle and target configurations, as well as incomplete observation.