Title
Needles In A Haystack: Tracking City-Scale Moving Vehicles From Continuously Moving Satellite
Abstract
In recent years, the satellite videos have been captured by moving satellite platforms. In contrast to consumers, movies, and common surveillance videos, satellite videos can record the snapshots of city-scale scenes. In a broad field-of-view of satellite videos, each moving target would be very tiny and usually composed of several pixels in frames. Even worse, the noise signals also exist in the video frames, and the background of the video frames subpixel-level and uneven moving thanks to the motion of satellites. We argue that it is a novel type of computer vision task since previous technologies are unable to detect such tiny moving vehicles efficiently. This paper proposes a novel framework that can identify small moving vehicles in satellite videos. In particular, we offer a novel detecting algorithm based on the local noise modeling. We differentiate the potential vehicle targets from noise patterns by an exponential probability distribution. Subsequently, a multi-morphological-cue based discrimination strategy is designed to distinguish correct vehicle targets from the existing noises further. Another significant contribution is to introduce a series of evaluation protocols to measure the performance of tiny moving vehicle detection systematically. We annotate satellite videos manually to test our algorithms under different evaluation criterions. The proposed algorithm is also compared with the state-of-the-art baselines, which demonstrates the advantages of our framework over the benchmarks. Besides, the dataset would be downloaded from <uri>http://first.authour.github.com</uri>.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1109/TIP.2019.2944097
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON IMAGE PROCESSING
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Satellites, Videos, Optical imaging, Task analysis, Earth, Vehicle dynamics, Surveillance, Tiny object detection, probabilistic noise modeling, evaluation, vehicle detection
Journal
29
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
1
1057-7149
3
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.37
13
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Wei Ao161.77
Yanwei Fu254351.93
Xiyue Hou330.37
Feng Xu424440.77