Analysis of the Influence of De-hazing Methods on Vehicle Detection in Aerial Images

In recent years, object detection from space in adverse weather, incredibly foggy, has been challenging. In this study, we conduct an empirical experiment using two de-hazing methods: DW-GAN and Two-Branch, for removing fog, then evaluate the detection performance of six advanced object detectors belonging to four main categories: two-stage, one-stage, anchor-free and end-to-end in original and de-hazed aerial images to find the best suitable solution for vehicle detection in foggy weather. We use the UIT-DroneFog dataset, a challenging dataset that includes a lot of small, dense objects captured in various altitudes, as the benchmark to evaluate the effectiveness of approaches. After experiments, we observe that each de-hazing method has different impacts on six experimental detectors.