Multi-Scale and Occlusion Aware Network for Vehicle Detection and Segmentation on UAV Aerial Images

With the advantage of high maneuverability, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been widely deployed in vehicle monitoring and controlling. However, processing the images captured by UAV for the extracting vehicle information is hindered by some challenges including arbitrary orientations, huge scale variations and partial occlusion. In seeking to address these challenges, we propose a novel Multi-Scale and Occlusion Aware Network (MSOA-Net) for UAV based vehicle segmentation, which consists of two parts including a Multi-Scale Feature Adaptive Fusion Network (MSFAF-Net) and a Regional Attention based Triple Head Network (RATH-Net). In MSFAF-Net, a self-adaptive feature fusion module is proposed, which can adaptively aggregate hierarchical feature maps from multiple levels to help Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) deal with the scale change of vehicles. The RATH-Net with a self-attention mechanism is proposed to guide the location-sensitive sub-networks to enhance the vehicle of interest and suppress background noise caused by occlusions. In this study, we release a large comprehensive UAV based vehicle segmentation dataset (UVSD), which is the first public dataset for UAV based vehicle detection and segmentation. Experiments are conducted on the challenging UVSD dataset. Experimental results show that the proposed method is efficient in detecting and segmenting vehicles, and outperforms the compared state-of-the-art works.