Remote Sensing Airport Detection Based on End-to-End Deep Transferable Convolutional Neural Networks

Rapid intelligent detection of airports from remote sensing images is required to accomplish autonomous intelligent landing of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and other tasks. To address the insufficiency of traditional models in detecting airports under complicated backgrounds from remote sensing images, we propose an end-to-end remote sensing airport hierarchical expression and detection model based on deep transferable convolutional neural networks. Based on transfer learning, we solve the fundamental problem of overfitting due to the inadequate number of labeled remote sensing images by transferring the network model from natural image source domain to remote sensing image target domain. In addition, we introduce a cascade region proposal network with soft-decision nonmaximal suppression to improve the network structure and the performance of our method under complex backgrounds. Moreover, we use skip-layer feature fusion and hard example mining methods to improve the object expression ability and the training efficiency. Finally, the experimental results demonstrate that the method established in this letter can quickly and effectively detect different types of airports over complex backgrounds and obtain better detection performance than the other detection methods.