A method for vehicle detection in high-resolution satellite images that uses a region-based object detector and unsupervised domain adaptation

Abstract

Recently, object detectors based on deep learning have become widely used for vehicle detection and contributed to drastic improvement in performance measures. However, deep learning requires much training data, and detection performance notably degrades when the target area of vehicle detection (the target domain) is dierent from the training data (the source domain). To address this problem, we propose an unsupervised domain adaptation (DA) method that does not require labeled training data, and thus can maintain detection performance in the target domain at a low cost. We applied Correlation alignment (CORAL) DA and adversarial DA to our region-based vehicle detector and improved the detection accuracy by over 10% in the target domain. We further improved adversarial DA by utilizing the reconstruction loss to facilitate learning semantic features. Our proposed method achieved slightly better performance than the accuracy achieved with the labeled training data of the target domain. We demonstrated that our improved DA method could achieve almost the same level of accuracy at a lower cost than non-DA methods with a sufficient amount of labeled training data of the target domain.