M-FCN: Effective fully convolutional network-based airplane detection framework

Airplane detection is a challenging problem in complex remote sensing imaging. In this letter, an effective airplane detection framework called Markov random field-fully convolutional network (M-FCN) is proposed. The M-FCN uses a cascade strategy that consists of an FCN-based coarse candidate extraction stage, a multi-Markov random field (multi-MRF)-based region proposal (RP) generation stage, and a final classification stage. In the first stage, the FCN model is trained to be sensitive to airplanes, and a coarse candidate map is generated. This model is scale-, direction-, and color-invariant and does not require many training examples. After the first stage, the coarse candidate map is used as the initial labeling field for a multi-MRF algorithm, and RPs are generated according to the multi-MRF output. This RP-generating strategy can yield more accurate locations with fewer RPs. In the last stage, a convolutional neural network-based classifier is used to improve the precision of the entire framework. Experiments show that the M-FCN has high precision, recall, and location accuracy.