Aircraft detection in remote sensing images using centre-based proposal regions and invariant features

Aircraft detection in remote sensing imagery has drawn much attention in recent years, which plays an important role in various military and civil applications. While many advanced works have been developed with powerful learning algorithms in natural images, there still lacks an effective one to detect aircraft precisely in remote sensing images, especially in some complicated conditions. In this paper, a novel method is designed to detect aircraft precisely, named aircraft detection using Centre-based Proposal regions and Invariant Features (CPIF), which can handle some difficult image deformations, especially rotations. Our framework mainly contains three steps. Firstly, we propose an algorithm to extract proposal regions from remote sensing imagery. Secondly, an ensemble learning classifier with the rotation-invariant HOG is trained for aircraft classification. Lastly, we detect aircraft in remote sensing images by combining the products of the above steps. The proposed method is evaluated on a public dataset RSOD and the results are performed to demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness in comparison with the state-of-the-art methods.