# Object Detection in Aerial Imagery

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.15479 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15479/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 20 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [iSAID: A Large-scale Dataset for Instance Segmentation in Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12886/) (2019)
- [Adaptive NMS: Refining Pedestrian Detection in a Crowd](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03629/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Object detection in natural images has achieved remarkable results over the years. However, a similar progress has not yet been observed in aerial object detection due to several challenges, such as high resolution images, instances scale variation, class imbalance etc. We show the performance of two-stage, one-stage and attention based object detectors on the iSAID dataset. Furthermore, we describe some modifications and analysis performed for different models - a) In two stage detector: introduced weighted attention based FPN, class balanced sampler and density prediction head. b) In one stage detector: used weighted focal loss and introduced FPN. c) In attention based detector: compare single,multi-scale attention and demonstrate effect of different backbones. Finally, we show a comparative study highlighting the pros and cons of different models in aerial imagery setting.