Semi-Supervised Person Detection in Aerial Images with Instance Segmentation and Maximum Mean Discrepancy Distance

Detecting sparse, small, lost persons with only a few pixels in high-resolution aerial images was, is, and remains an important and difficult mission, in which a vital role is played by accurate monitoring and intelligent co-rescuing for the search and rescue (SaR) system. However, many problems hav...

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Main Authors: Xiangqing Zhang, Yan Feng, Shun Zhang, Nan Wang, Shaohui Mei, Mingyi He
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2023-06-01
Series:Remote Sensing
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/15/11/2928
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author Xiangqing Zhang
Yan Feng
Shun Zhang
Nan Wang
Shaohui Mei
Mingyi He
author_facet Xiangqing Zhang
Yan Feng
Shun Zhang
Nan Wang
Shaohui Mei
Mingyi He
author_sort Xiangqing Zhang
collection DOAJ
description Detecting sparse, small, lost persons with only a few pixels in high-resolution aerial images was, is, and remains an important and difficult mission, in which a vital role is played by accurate monitoring and intelligent co-rescuing for the search and rescue (SaR) system. However, many problems have not been effectively solved in existing remote-vision-based SaR systems, such as the shortage of person samples in SaR scenarios and the low tolerance of small objects for bounding boxes. To address these issues, a copy-paste mechanism (ISCP) with semi-supervised object detection (SSOD) via instance segmentation and maximum mean discrepancy distance is proposed (MMD), which can provide highly robust, multi-task, and efficient aerial-based person detection for the prototype SaR system. Specifically, numerous pseudo-labels are obtained by accurately segmenting the instances of synthetic ISCP samples to obtain their boundaries. The SSOD trainer then uses soft weights to balance the prediction entropy of the loss function between the ground truth and unreliable labels. Moreover, a novel evaluation metric MMD for anchor-based detectors is proposed to elegantly compute the IoU of the bounding boxes. Extensive experiments and ablation studies on Heridal and optimized public datasets demonstrate that our approach is effective and achieves state-of-the-art person detection performance in aerial images.
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spelling doaj.art-674babddd4004ef89321d9e5a45be8ac2023-11-18T08:30:40ZengMDPI AGRemote Sensing2072-42922023-06-011511292810.3390/rs15112928Semi-Supervised Person Detection in Aerial Images with Instance Segmentation and Maximum Mean Discrepancy DistanceXiangqing Zhang0Yan Feng1Shun Zhang2Nan Wang3Shaohui Mei4Mingyi He5School of Electronics and Information, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an 710072, ChinaSchool of Electronics and Information, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an 710072, ChinaSchool of Electronics and Information, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an 710072, ChinaSchool of Electronics and Information, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an 710072, ChinaSchool of Electronics and Information, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an 710072, ChinaSchool of Electronics and Information, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an 710072, ChinaDetecting sparse, small, lost persons with only a few pixels in high-resolution aerial images was, is, and remains an important and difficult mission, in which a vital role is played by accurate monitoring and intelligent co-rescuing for the search and rescue (SaR) system. However, many problems have not been effectively solved in existing remote-vision-based SaR systems, such as the shortage of person samples in SaR scenarios and the low tolerance of small objects for bounding boxes. To address these issues, a copy-paste mechanism (ISCP) with semi-supervised object detection (SSOD) via instance segmentation and maximum mean discrepancy distance is proposed (MMD), which can provide highly robust, multi-task, and efficient aerial-based person detection for the prototype SaR system. Specifically, numerous pseudo-labels are obtained by accurately segmenting the instances of synthetic ISCP samples to obtain their boundaries. The SSOD trainer then uses soft weights to balance the prediction entropy of the loss function between the ground truth and unreliable labels. Moreover, a novel evaluation metric MMD for anchor-based detectors is proposed to elegantly compute the IoU of the bounding boxes. Extensive experiments and ablation studies on Heridal and optimized public datasets demonstrate that our approach is effective and achieves state-of-the-art person detection performance in aerial images.https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/15/11/2928semi-supervised object detectioncopy-paste mechanisminstance segmentationmaximum mean discrepancyaerial-based person detection
spellingShingle Xiangqing Zhang
Yan Feng
Shun Zhang
Nan Wang
Shaohui Mei
Mingyi He
Semi-Supervised Person Detection in Aerial Images with Instance Segmentation and Maximum Mean Discrepancy Distance
Remote Sensing
semi-supervised object detection
copy-paste mechanism
instance segmentation
maximum mean discrepancy
aerial-based person detection
title Semi-Supervised Person Detection in Aerial Images with Instance Segmentation and Maximum Mean Discrepancy Distance
title_full Semi-Supervised Person Detection in Aerial Images with Instance Segmentation and Maximum Mean Discrepancy Distance
title_fullStr Semi-Supervised Person Detection in Aerial Images with Instance Segmentation and Maximum Mean Discrepancy Distance
title_full_unstemmed Semi-Supervised Person Detection in Aerial Images with Instance Segmentation and Maximum Mean Discrepancy Distance
title_short Semi-Supervised Person Detection in Aerial Images with Instance Segmentation and Maximum Mean Discrepancy Distance
title_sort semi supervised person detection in aerial images with instance segmentation and maximum mean discrepancy distance
topic semi-supervised object detection
copy-paste mechanism
instance segmentation
maximum mean discrepancy
aerial-based person detection
url https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/15/11/2928
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