A hybrid deep learning–based model for automatic car extraction from high-resolution airborne imagery

Automatic car extraction (ACE) from high-resolution airborne imagery (i.e., true-orthophoto) has been a hot research topic in the field of photogrammetry and machine learning. ACE from high-resolution airborne imagery is the most suitable method for control and monitoring practices in large cities such as traffic management. The use of deep learning–based feature extraction methods, such as convolutional neural networks, have been providing state-of-the-art performance in the last few years, particularly, these techniques have been successfully applied to automatic object extraction from images. In this paper, we proposed a novel hybrid method to take advantage of the semantic segmentation of high-resolution airborne imagery to ACE that is realized based on the combination of deep convolutional neural networks and restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM). This hybrid method is called RBMDeepNet. We trained and tested our model on the ISPRS Potsdam and Vaihingen benchmark datasets (non-big data) which is more challenging for ACE. Here, Potsdam data is a true-color dataset, and Vaihingen data is a false-color dataset. The results obtained in the present study showed that the proposed method for ACE from high-resolution airborne imagery achieves a 7% improvement in accuracy with about 10% improvement in processing time compared to similar methods.