Salient man-made object detection based on saliency potential energy for unmanned aerial vehicles remote sensing image

Abstract It is difficult to automatically recognize complex ground objects, and massive data images with the super-high ground resolution in images captured by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). In order to directly identify the salient man-made ground objects from the UAV remote sensing (RS) image, a saliency detection method based on saliency potential energy (SPE) is proposed. With a detection, filtration and backtracking strategy, the texture, shape and colour of the UAV RS image are comprehensively and numerally analysed by the SPE to detect the salient man-made objects. Both qualitative and quantitative evaluations have indicated that, compared to the state-of-art saliency detection methods, our method could achieve better performance with better accuracy and less errors, which prove that our method has great application potential in UAV RS image understanding.