A multi-model ensemble method based on convolutional neural networks for aircraft detection in large remote sensing images

ABSTRACT Aircraft detection is one of hot issues of remote sensing (RS) image interpretation. Different from existing methods which aim at detecting objects in regions of interest (ROI) of airports, in this work, we propose a novel and effective aircraft detection framework based on convolutional neural networks (CNN) to detect multi-scale targets in extremely large and complicated scenes. In particular, we design a constrained EdgeBoxes (CEdgeBoxes) approach to generate a modest number of target candidates quickly and precisely. Then, in order to overcome the drawbacks of using handcrafted features and traditional classifiers, a modified GoogLeNet combined with Fast Region-based CNN (R-CNN) is designed to extract useful features from RS images and then detect various kinds of multi-scale aircrafts. Most importantly, we propose a new multi-model ensemble method to decrease the false alarm rate (FAR) caused by the imbalanced distribution of complicated targets and backgrounds. Thorough experiments, which are conducted on the dataset acquired by QuickBird with a resolution of 0.6 m, demonstrate our method can effectively detect aircrafts in large scenes with low FARs.