# Object Detection in Aerial Images: What Improves the Accuracy?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.08763 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08763/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Jan 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [Identity Mappings in Deep Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.05027/) (2016)
- [YOLOv4: Optimal Speed and Accuracy of Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10934/) (2020)
- [YOLO9000: Better, Faster, Stronger](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08242/) (2016)
- [DOTA: A Large-scale Dataset for Object Detection in Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10398/) (2017)
- [Soft-NMS -- Improving Object Detection With One Line of Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04503/) (2017)
- [Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images: A Survey and A New Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00133/) (2019)
- [The Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Benchmark: Object Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00518/) (2018)
- [iSAID: A Large-scale Dataset for Instance Segmentation in Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12886/) (2019)
- [xView: Objects in Context in Overhead Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.07856/) (2018)
- [Concurrent Spatial and Channel Squeeze & Excitation in Fully Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02579/) (2018)
- [A Survey of Modern Deep Learning based Object Detection Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11892/) (2021)
- [Clustered Object Detection in Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08008/) (2019)
- [TPH-YOLOv5: Improved YOLOv5 Based on Transformer Prediction Head for Object Detection on Drone-captured Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11539/) (2021)
- [Adaptive Class Suppression Loss for Long-Tail Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00885/) (2021)
- [Orthogonal Projection Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14021/) (2021)
- [DARDet: A Dense Anchor-free Rotated Object Detector in Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.01025/) (2021)
- [Context-Aware Single-Shot Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.08682/) (2017)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Object detection is a challenging and popular computer vision problem. The problem is even more challenging in aerial images due to significant variation in scale and viewpoint in a diverse set of object categories. Recently, deep learning-based object detection approaches have been actively explored for the problem of object detection in aerial images. In this work, we investigate the impact of Faster R-CNN for aerial object detection and explore numerous strategies to improve its performance for aerial images. We conduct extensive experiments on the challenging iSAID dataset. The resulting adapted Faster R-CNN obtains a significant mAP gain of 4.96% over its vanilla baseline counterpart on the iSAID validation set, demonstrating the impact of different strategies investigated in this work.