CSVM Architectures for Pixel-Wise Object Detection in High-Resolution Remote Sensing Images

Detecting objects becomes an increasingly important task in very high resolution (VHR) remote sensing imagery analysis. With the development of GPU-computing capability, a growing number of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been designed to address the object detection challenge. However, compared with CPU, GPU is much more costly. Therefore, GPU-based methods are less attractive in practical applications. In this article, we propose a CPU-based method that is based on convolutional support vector machines (CSVMs) to address the object detection challenge in VHR images. Experiments are conducted on three VHR and two unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) data sets with very limited training data. Results show that the proposed CSVM achieves competitive performance compared to U-Net which is an efficient CNN-based model designed for small training data sets.