Vehicle detection of multi-source remote sensing data using active fine-tuning network

Vehicle detection in remote sensing images has attracted increasing interest in recent years. However, its detection ability is limited due to lack of well-annotated samples, especially in densely crowded scenes. Furthermore, since a list of remotely sensed data sources is available, efficient exploitation of useful information from multi-source data for better vehicle detection is challenging. To solve the above issues, a multi-source active fine-tuning vehicle detection (Ms-AFt) framework is proposed, which integrates transfer learning, segmentation, and active classification into a unified framework for auto-labeling and detection. The proposed Ms-AFt employs a fine-tuning network to firstly generate a vehicle training set from an unlabeled dataset. To cope with the diversity of vehicle categories, a multi-source based segmentation branch is then designed to construct additional candidate object sets. The separation of high quality vehicles is realized by a designed attentive classifications network. Finally, all three branches are combined to achieve vehicle detection. Extensive experimental results conducted on two open ISPRS benchmark datasets, namely the Vaihingen village and Potsdam city datasets, demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of the proposed Ms-AFt for vehicle detection. In addition, the generalization ability of Ms-AFt in dense remote sensing scenes is further verified on stereo aerial imagery of a large camping site.