A subclass supported convolutional neural network for object detection and localization in remote-sensing images

This article proposes a novel subclass-based classifier based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for detecting objects more accurately on remote-sensing images. The proposed classifier, called subclass supported CNN (SSCNN), is used to separate the representation of the objects into subclasses such as nearcentre, centre, and border depending on the distance of the object centre to obtain more effective feature extractor. A three-stage object recognition framework is used to evaluate the performance of the proposed classifier. In the first of these stages, the Selective Search algorithm generates object proposals from the image. Then, the proposed SSCNN classifies the proposals. Finally, subclass-based localization evaluation function has been proposed to calculate the localization of the object with classification results. Due to the limited number of satellite image samples, pretrained AlexNet is used by transfer learning approach to build effective feature extractor. The proposed method has been compared with region-based CNN (R-CNN) on a four-class remote-sensing test dataset consisting of 411 airplanes, 240 baseball diamonds, 468 storage tanks, and 83 ground track fields. In addition, Faster R-CNN has been trained with SSCNN features and the performances of the trained Faster R-CNNs are comparatively evaluated on 10-class remote-sensing image dataset. Experiment results have shown that the proposed framework can locate the objects precisely.