Aircraft detection based on probability model of structural elements

Detecting aircrafts is important in the field of remote sensing. In past decades, researchers used various approaches to detect aircrafts based on classifiers for overall aircrafts. However, with the development of high-resolution images, the internal structures of aircrafts should also be taken into consideration now. To address this issue, a novel aircrafts detection method for satellite images based on probabilistic topic model is presented. We model aircrafts as the connected structural elements rather than features. The proposed method contains two major steps: 1) Use Cascade-Adaboost classier to identify the structural elements of aircraft firstly. 2) Connect these structural elements to aircrafts, where the relationships between elements are estimated by hierarchical topic model. The model places strict spatial constraints on structural elements which can identify differences between similar features. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach.