SDM-Car: A Dataset for Small and Dim Moving Vehicles Detection in Satellite Videos

Abstract

Vehicle detection and tracking in satellite video is essential in remote sensing (RS) applications. However, upon the statistical analysis of existing datasets, we find that the dim vehicles with low radiation intensity and limited contrast against the background are rarely annotated, which leads to the poor effect of existing approaches in detecting moving vehicles under low radiation conditions. In this letter, we address the challenge by building a small and dim moving cars (SDM-Car) dataset with a multitude of annotations for dim vehicles in satellite videos, which is collected by the Luojia 3–01 satellite and comprises 99 high-quality videos. Furthermore, we propose a method based on image enhancement and attention mechanisms to improve the detection accuracy of dim vehicles, serving as a benchmark for evaluating the dataset. Finally, we assess the performance of several representative methods on SDM-Car and present insightful findings. The dataset is openly available at https://github.com/TanedaM/SDM-Car .