Affine Invariant Description and Large-Margin Dimensionality Reduction for Target Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images

A novel target detection method based on affine invariant interest point detection, feature encoding, and large-margin dimensionality reduction (LDR) is proposed for optical remote sensing images. First, four types of interest point detectors are introduced, and their performance in extracting low-level affine invariant descriptors using affine shape estimation is compared. Such a description can deal with significant affine transformations, including viewpoints. Second, feature encoding, which extends bag-of-words (BOW) by encoding high-order statistics, is selected to generate mid-level representation. Finally, LDR based on the large-margin constraint and stochastic subgradient is introduced to make the high-dimensional mid-level representation applicable for target detection. The experiments on aircraft and vehicle detections illustrate the effectiveness of the affine invariant description and LDR (compared with principal component analysis) in improving the detection performance. The experiments also demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method compared with popular approaches including Gabor, HOG, LBP, BOW, and R-CNN.