Weakly Supervised Vehicle Detection in Satellite Images via Multiple Instance Ranking

Given the difficulty in labeling sufficient amount of instances across different resolutions and imaging environment of satellite images, weakly supervised vehicle detection is with great importance for satellite images analysis and processing. To prevent such cumbersome and meticulous manual annotation, naturally we have introduced the weakly supervised detection that has recently explosively prevalent in ordinary viewing angle images. Our program merely stands in need of region-level group annotation, i.e., whether this district convers vehicle(s) without plainly pointing out the coordinates of vehicles. There are two major problems are often encountered for Weakly Supervised Object Detection. One is that it is often chooses only a most expressive instance contains multiple target objects which often have a bigger probability when selecting a target block. For this problem, the number of vehicles can be estimated based on the object counting, a combinatorial selection algorithm can be used to select patch which contains at most one vehicle instance. Another problem is that precise object positioning becomes more difficult due to the lack of instance-level supervision. This problem can be optimized by a progressive learning strategy. Experiments was carried on wide-ranging remote sensing dataset and achieved better results compared to the state-of-the-art weakly supervised vehicle detection schemes.