  Detecting small objects over large areas remains a significant challenge in
satellite imagery analytics. Among the challenges is the sheer number of pixels
and geographical extent per image: a single DigitalGlobe satellite image
encompasses over 64 km2 and over 250 million pixels. Another challenge is that
objects of interest are often minuscule (~pixels in extent even for the highest
resolution imagery), which complicates traditional computer vision techniques.
To address these issues, we propose a pipeline (SIMRDWN) that evaluates
satellite images of arbitrarily large size at native resolution at a rate of >
0.2 km2/s. Building upon the tensorflow object detection API paper, this
pipeline offers a unified approach to multiple object detection frameworks that
can run inference on images of arbitrary size. The SIMRDWN pipeline includes a
modified version of YOLO (known as YOLT), along with the models of the
tensorflow object detection API: SSD, Faster R-CNN, and R-FCN. The proposed
approach allows comparison of the performance of these four frameworks, and can
rapidly detect objects of vastly different scales with relatively little
training data over multiple sensors. For objects of very different scales (e.g.
airplanes versus airports) we find that using two different detectors at
different scales is very effective with negligible runtime cost.We evaluate
large test images at native resolution and find mAP scores of 0.2 to 0.8 for
vehicle localization, with the YOLT architecture achieving both the highest mAP
and fastest inference speed.
