Weighted Ensemble Object Detection with Optimized Coefficients for Remote Sensing Images

The detection of objects in very high-resolution (VHR) remote sensing images has become increasingly popular with the enhancement of remote sensing technologies. High-resolution images from aircrafts or satellites contain highly detailed and mixed backgrounds that decrease the success of object detection in remote sensing images. In this study, a model that performs weighted ensemble object detection using optimized coefficients is proposed. This model uses the outputs of three different object detection models trained on the same dataset. The model’s structure takes two or more object detection methods as its input and provides an output with an optimized coefficient-weighted ensemble. The Northwestern Polytechnical University Very High Resolution 10 (NWPU-VHR10) and Remote Sensing Object Detection (RSOD) datasets were used to measure the object detection success of the proposed model. Our experiments reveal that the proposed model improved the Mean Average Precision (mAP) performance by 0.78%–16.5% compared to stand-alone models and presents better mean average precision than other state-of-the-art methods (3.55% higher on the NWPU-VHR-10 dataset and 1.49% higher when using the RSOD dataset). View Full-Text