Hierarchical reinforcement learning for saliency detection of low-resolution airports

The traditional airport detection methods usually utilize geometric characteristics, which are limited by large amount of data and low-resolution of the remote sensing images. In this paper, we present a novel hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) saliency model for quickly airports detecting in large cover area. In contrast with conventional saliency models which usually are effective for high-resolution nature images, our method learns hierarchically high-level features via multi-scale superpixels segmentation and Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (LASSO). More importantly, we introduce back-propagation theory for hierarchical learning to adaptively control and generate saliency map. Therefore our unsupervised saliency model is more simple and effective for low-resolution airport detection. Compared with 18 state-of-the-art saliency models, experimental results demonstrate the excellent performance of our method on the remote sensing image datasets. It is more robust and accurate for long-range airports detection.