# Learning to Holistically Detect Bridges from Large-Size VHR Remote Sensing Imagery

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.02481 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02481/

## Key facts

- Cited by 17 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 68 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [MMDetection: Open MMLab Detection Toolbox and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07155/) (2019)
- [DOTA: A Large-scale Dataset for Object Detection in Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10398/) (2017)
- [Bridging the Gap Between Anchor-based and Anchor-free Detection via Adaptive Training Sample Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02424/) (2019)
- [Cascade R-CNN: High Quality Object Detection and Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.09756/) (2019)
- [Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images: A Survey and A New Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00133/) (2019)
- [Oriented R-CNN for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05699/) (2021)
- [TOOD: Task-aligned One-stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07755/) (2021)
- [Object Detection in Aerial Images: A Large-Scale Benchmark and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12219/) (2021)
- [ReDet: A Rotation-equivariant Detector for Aerial Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07733/) (2021)
- [R3Det: Refined Single-Stage Detector with Feature Refinement for Rotating Object](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05612/) (2019)
- [FCOS: A simple and strong anchor-free object detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09214/) (2020)
- [Mesh-TensorFlow: Deep Learning for Supercomputers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.02084/) (2018)
- [Rethinking Rotated Object Detection with Gaussian Wasserstein Distance Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11952/) (2021)
- [FAIR1M: A Benchmark Dataset for Fine-grained Object Recognition in High-Resolution Remote Sensing Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05569/) (2021)
- [Gliding vertex on the horizontal bounding box for multi-oriented object detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09358/) (2019)
- [Learning High-Precision Bounding Box for Rotated Object Detection via Kullback-Leibler Divergence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01883/) (2021)
- [Towards Large-Scale Small Object Detection: Survey and Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14096/) (2022)
- [MMRotate: A Rotated Object Detection Benchmark using PyTorch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13317/) (2022)
- [Anchor-free Oriented Proposal Generator for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.01931/) (2021)
- [Slicing Aided Hyper Inference and Fine-tuning for Small Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06934/) (2022)
- [Oriented RepPoints for Aerial Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11111/) (2021)
- [Region Proposal by Guided Anchoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.03278/) (2019)
- [Learning Modulated Loss for Rotated Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08299/) (2019)
- [Neural Image Compression for Gigapixel Histopathology Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.02840/) (2018)
- [SCRDet++: Detecting Small, Cluttered and Rotated Objects via Instance-Level Feature Denoising and Rotation Loss Smoothing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13316/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [When Large Vision-Language Model Meets Large Remote Sensing Imagery: Coarse-to-Fine Text-Guided Token Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07588/) (2025)
- [STAR: A First-Ever Dataset and A Large-Scale Benchmark for Scene Graph Generation in Large-Size Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09410/) (2024)
- [PointOBB-v3: Expanding Performance Boundaries of Single Point-Supervised Oriented Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13898/) (2025)
- [OpenRSD: Towards Open-prompts for Object Detection in Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06146/) (2025)
- [Annotation-Free Open-Vocabulary Segmentation for Remote-Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18067/) (2025)
- [Exploiting Unlabeled Data with Multiple Expert Teachers for Open Vocabulary Aerial Object Detection and Its Orientation Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02057/) (2024)
- [MEET: A Million-Scale Dataset for Fine-Grained Geospatial Scene Classification with Zoom-Free Remote Sensing Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11219/) (2025)
- [HoliTracer: Holistic Vectorization of Geographic Objects from Large-Size Remote Sensing Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16251/) (2025)
- [Open-Vocabulary Object Detection in UAV Imagery: A Review and Future Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.13359/) (2025)
- [SMART-Ship: A Comprehensive Synchronized Multi-modal Aligned Remote Sensing Targets Dataset and Benchmark for Berthed Ships Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02384/) (2025)
- [FUSAR-KLIP: Towards Multimodal Foundation Models for Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23927/) (2025)
- [Co-Training Vision Language Models for Remote Sensing Multi-task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21272/) (2025)
- [SLIP-RS: Structured-Attribute Language-Image Pre-Training for Remote Sensing Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.23144/) (2026)
- [Renormalized Connection for Scale-preferred Object Detection in Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.05624/) (2024)
- [WLC: Weber-Inspired Local Contrast Metric for Low-Altitude Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.15211/) (2025)
- [Exploiting answer-invariant redundancies in satellite imagery for efficient VLM inference on edge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.29029/) (2026)
- [VesselBench-800K: A Large-scale Perception Benchmark for Multimodal Vessel Detection, Counting, and Density Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.37003/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Bridge detection in remote sensing images (RSIs) plays a crucial role in various applications, but it poses unique challenges compared to the detection of other objects. In RSIs, bridges exhibit considerable variations in terms of their spatial scales and aspect ratios. Therefore, to ensure the visibility and integrity of bridges, it is essential to perform holistic bridge detection in large-size very-high-resolution (VHR) RSIs. However, the lack of datasets with large-size VHR RSIs limits the deep learning algorithms' performance on bridge detection. Due to the limitation of GPU memory in tackling large-size images, deep learning-based object detection methods commonly adopt the cropping strategy, which inevitably results in label fragmentation and discontinuous prediction. To ameliorate the scarcity of datasets, this paper proposes a large-scale dataset named GLH-Bridge comprising 6,000 VHR RSIs sampled from diverse geographic locations across the globe. These images encompass a wide range of sizes, varying from 2,048*2,048 to 16,38*16,384 pixels, and collectively feature 59,737 bridges. Furthermore, we present an efficient network for holistic bridge detection (HBD-Net) in large-size RSIs. The HBD-Net presents a separate detector-based feature fusion (SDFF) architecture and is optimized via a shape-sensitive sample re-weighting (SSRW) strategy. Based on the proposed GLH-Bridge dataset, we establish a bridge detection benchmark including the OBB and HBB tasks, and validate the effectiveness of the proposed HBD-Net. Additionally, cross-dataset generalization experiments on two publicly available datasets illustrate the strong generalization capability of the GLH-Bridge dataset.