Detecting Moving Vehicles from Satellite-Based Videos by Tracklet Feature Classification

Satellite-based video enables potential vehicle monitoring and tracking for urban traffic management. However, due to the tiny size of moving vehicles and cluttered background, it is difficult to distinguish actual targets from random noise and pseudo-moving objects, resulting in low detection accuracy. In contrast to the currently overused deep-learning-based methods, this study takes full advantage of the geometric properties of vehicle tracklets (segments of moving object trajectory) and proposes a tracklet-feature-based method that can achieve high precision and high recall. The approach is a two-step strategy: (1) smoothing filtering is used to suppress noise, and then a non-parametric-based background subtracting model is applied for obtaining preliminary recognition results with high recall but low precision; and (2) generated tracklets are used to discriminate between true and false vehicles by tracklet feature classification. Experiments and evaluations were performed on SkySat and ChangGuang acquired videos, showing that our method can improve precision and retain high recall, outperforming some classical and deep-learning methods from previously published literature.