Broad Area Search and Detection of Surface-to-Air Missile Sites Using Spatial Fusion of Component Object Detections from Deep Neural Networks
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Here we demonstrate how Deep Neural Network (DNN) detections of multiple constitutive or component objects that are part of a larger, more complex, and encompassing feature can be spatially fused to improve the search, detection, and retrieval (ranking) of the larger complex feature. First, scores computed from a spatial clustering algorithm are normalized to a reference space so that they are independent of image resolution and DNN input chip size. Then, multi-scale DNN detections from various component objects are fused to improve the detection and retrieval of DNN detections of a larger complex feature. We demonstrate the utility of this approach for broad area search and detection of Surface-to-Air Missile (SAM) sites that have a very low occurrence rate (only 16 sites) over a 90,000 km^2 study area in SE China. The results demonstrate that spatial fusion of multi-scale component-object DNN detections can reduce the detection error rate of SAM Sites by >85 recall. The novel spatial fusion approach demonstrated here can be easily extended to a wide variety of other challenging object search and detection problems in large-scale remote sensing image datasets.
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