Vehicle Detection From UAV Imagery With Deep Learning: A Review

What is it about?

Vehicle detection from unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) imagery is one of the most important tasks in a large number of computer vision-based applications. This crucial task needed to be done with high accuracy and speed. However, it is a very challenging task due to many characteristics related to the aerial images and the used hardware, such as different vehicle sizes, orientations, types, density, limited datasets, and inference speed. In recent years, many classical and deep-learning-based methods have been proposed in the literature to address these problems. Handed engineering- and shallow learning-based techniques suffer from poor accuracy and generalization to other complex cases. Deep-learning-based vehicle detection algorithms achieved better results due to their powerful learning ability. In this article, we provide a review on vehicle detection from UAV imagery using deep learning techniques. We start by presenting the different types of deep learning architectures, such as convolutional neural networks, recurrent neural networks, autoencoders, generative adversarial networks, and their contribution to improve the vehicle detection task. Then, we focus on investigating the different vehicle detection methods, datasets, and the encountered challenges all along with the suggested solutions. Finally, we summarize and compare the techniques used to improve vehicle detection from UAV-based images, which could be a useful aid to researchers and developers to select the most adequate method for their needs.

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Photo by ShareGrid on Unsplash

Photo by ShareGrid on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The main contributions of this article are given as follows. 1) We introduce the most known and powerful deep learning architectures that contribute to improve vehicle detection performance in UAV-based images and videos, where different techniques are introduced to enhance small size, dense, and oriented vehicle detection. 2) We describe the most used aerial image/video benchmark datasets and their properties while presenting for what application each dataset is better for. 3) We present the best available vehicle detection frameworks in the last years all along with their accuracy and speed evaluation. Also, lightweight detectors for small devices are presented. 4) We discuss various UAV-based vehicle detection challenges all along with the impact of different parameters on the detection accuracy and speed. The parameters include the image resolution, altitude, and view angle.