Fast vehicle detection in UAV images

Abstract

Fast and accurate vehicle detection in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) images remains a challenge, due to its very high spatial resolution and very few annotations. Although numerous vehicle detection methods exist, most of them cannot achieve real-time detection for different scenes. Recently, deep learning algorithms has achieved fantastic detection performance in computer vision, especially regression based convolutional neural networks YOLOv2. It's good both at accuracy and speed, outperforming other state-of-the-art detection methods. This paper for the first time aims to investigate the use of YOLOv2 for vehicle detection in UAV images, as well as to explore the new method for data annotation. Our method starts with image annotation and data augmentation. CSK tracking method is used to help annotate vehicles in images captured from simple scenes. Subsequently, a regression based single convolutional neural network YOLOv2 is used to detect vehicles in UAV images. To evaluate our method, UAV video images were taken over several urban areas, and experiments were conducted on this dataset and Stanford Drone dataset. The experimental results have proven that our data preparation strategy is useful, and YOLOv2 is effective for real-time vehicle detection of UAV video images.