Man-Made Object Detection in Aerial Images Using Color Statistical Features and Machine Learning

Generally, the photos captured by drones and satellites include both natural scenes and man-made objects. Having these two categories classified, we will be able to extract important information from aerial scenes such as the shapes and the alignments of the structures and then, create labeled aerial images accordingly. Obtaining such information is of great interest in, for example, military, urban, and environmental protection applications. However, due to a huge amount of data that is collected in form of images, it seems that manually processing of such data is impossible. Therefore, employing automatic techniques based on artificial intelligence has become more on demand. There are numerous researches on this topic from which detection of buildings, vehicles, roads, and vegetation are of more interest. In this paper, we aim to introduce a method to detect man-made objects in aerial images based on a new set of color statistical features, which can be easily extracted, together with a learning model. Experimental results on a publicly available dataset, Massachusetts dataset, have shown promising results in terms of both accuracy and processing time; the accuracy and the average processing time are 90.07% and 0.96 seconds, respectively.