Rotation-Invariant Object Detection in High-Resolution Satellite Imagery Using Superpixel-Based Deep Hough Forests

This letter presents a rotation-invariant method for detecting geospatial objects from high-resolution satellite images. First, a superpixel segmentation strategy is proposed to generate meaningful and nonredundant patches. Second, a multilayer deep feature generation model is developed to generate high-level feature representations of patches using deep learning techniques. Third, a set of multiscale Hough forests with embedded patch orientations is constructed to cast rotation-invariant votes for estimating object centroids. Quantitative evaluations on the images collected from Google Earth service show that an average completeness, correctness, quality, and F₁- measure values of 0.958, 0.969, 0.929, and 0.963, respectively, are obtained. Comparative studies with three existing methods demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method in accurately and correctly detecting objects that are arbitrarily oriented and of varying sizes.