A Weakly-Supervised Deep Network for DSM-Aided Vehicle Detection

With the breakthrough of the spatial resolution of optical remote sensing images at the sub-meter level and the explosive development of deep learning, geospatial object detection has achieved a growing interest in remote sensing community. However, labeling large training datasets in object level is still an expensive and tedious procedure. This might lead to the poor model generalization and degraded network learning ability. To this end, a weakly-supervised deep network (WSDN) is developed for geospatial object detection by applying a digital surface model (DSM)-aided auto-labeling and a pre-trained network learned from the task-independent dataset. Experimental results conducted on the stereo aerial imagery of a large camping site are performed to demonstrate that the proposed WSDN yields better detection results, with 62.78% precision and 55.13% recall.