Airport detection from remote sensing images using transferable convolutional neural networks

Peng Zhang, Xin Niu, Yong Dou, Fei Xia

Abstract: This paper presents a method for airport detection from optical satellite images using deep convolutional neural networks (CNN). To achieve fast detection with high accuracy, region proposal by searching adjacent parallel line segments has been applied to select candidate fields with potential runways. These proposals were further classified by a CNN model transfer learned from AlexNet to identify the final airport regions from other confusing classes. The proposed method has been tested on a remote sensing dataset consisting of 120 airports. Experiments showed that the proposed method could recognize airports from a large complex area in seconds with an accuracy of 84.1%.