Improved faster RCNN based on feature amplification and oversampling data augmentation for oriented vehicle detection in aerial images

Abstract

Vehicles in aerial images are generally with small sizes and unbalanced number of samples, which leads to the poor performances of the existing vehicle detection algorithms. Therefore, an oriented vehicle detection framework based on improved Faster RCNN is proposed for aerial images. First of all, we propose an oversampling and stitching data augmentation method to decrease the negative effect of category imbalance in the training dataset and construct a new dataset with balanced number of samples. Then considering that the pooling operation may loss the discriminative ability of features for small objects, we propose to amplify the feature map so that detailed information hidden in the last feature map can be enriched. Finally, we design a joint training loss function including center loss for both horizontal and oriented bounding boxes, and reduce the impact of small inter-class diversity on vehicle detection. The proposed framework is evaluated on the VEDAI dataset that consists of 9 vehicle categories. The experimental results show that the proposed framework outperforms previous approaches with a mean average precision of 60.4% and 60.1% in detecting horizontal and oriented bounding boxes respectively, which is about 8% better than Faster RCNN.