Owing to effective and flexible data acquisition, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has recently become a hotspot across the fields of computer vision (CV) and remote sensing (RS). Inspired by recent success of deep learning (DL), many advanced object detection and tracking approaches have been widely applied to various UAV-related tasks, such as environmental monitoring, precision agriculture, traffic management. This paper provides a comprehensive survey on the research progress and prospects of DL-based UAV object detection and tracking methods. More specifically, we first outline the challenges, statistics of existing methods, and provide solutions from the perspectives of DL-based models in three research topics: object detection from the image, object detection from the video, and object tracking from the video. Open datasets related to UAV-dominated object detection and tracking are exhausted, and four benchmark datasets are employed for performance evaluation using some state-of-the-art methods. Finally, prospects and considerations for the future work are discussed and summarized. It is expected that this survey can facilitate those researchers who come from remote sensing field with an overview of DL-based UAV object detection and tracking methods, along with some thoughts on their further developments.

The rapid development of facial manipulation techniques has aroused public concerns in recent years. Following the success of deep learning, existing methods always formulate DeepFake video detection as a binary classification problem and develop frame-based and video-based solutions. However, little attention has been paid to capturing the spatial-temporal inconsistency in forged videos. To address this issue, we term this task as a Spatial-Temporal Inconsistency Learning (STIL) process and instantiate it into a novel STIL block, which consists of a Spatial Inconsistency Module (SIM), a Temporal Inconsistency Module (TIM), and an Information Supplement Module (ISM). Specifically, we present a novel temporal modeling paradigm in TIM by exploiting the temporal difference over adjacent frames along with both horizontal and vertical directions. And the ISM simultaneously utilizes the spatial information from SIM and temporal information from TIM to establish a more comprehensive spatial-temporal representation. Moreover, our STIL block is flexible and could be plugged into existing 2D CNNs. Extensive experiments and visualizations are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method against the state-of-the-art competitors.

The detection performance of small objects in remote sensing images is not satisfactory compared to large objects, especially in low-resolution and noisy images. A generative adversarial network (GAN)-based model called enhanced super-resolution GAN (ESRGAN) shows remarkable image enhancement performance, but reconstructed images miss high-frequency edge information. Therefore, object detection performance degrades for small objects on recovered noisy and low-resolution remote sensing images. Inspired by the success of edge enhanced GAN (EEGAN) and ESRGAN, we apply a new edge-enhanced super-resolution GAN (EESRGAN) to improve the image quality of remote sensing images and use different detector networks in an end-to-end manner where detector loss is backpropagated into the EESRGAN to improve the detection performance. We propose an architecture with three components: ESRGAN, Edge Enhancement Network (EEN), and Detection network. We use residual-in-residual dense blocks (RRDB) for both the ESRGAN and EEN, and for the detector network, we use the faster region-based convolutional network (FRCNN) (two-stage detector) and single-shot multi-box detector (SSD) (one stage detector). Extensive experiments on a public (car overhead with context) and a self-assembled (oil and gas storage tank) satellite dataset show superior performance of our method compared to the standalone state-of-the-art object detectors.

Clustering is a fundamental task in data analysis. Recently, deep clustering, which derives inspiration primarily from deep learning approaches, achieves state-of-the-art performance and has attracted considerable attention. Current deep clustering methods usually boost the clustering results by means of the powerful representation ability of deep learning, e.g., autoencoder, suggesting that learning an effective representation for clustering is a crucial requirement. The strength of deep clustering methods is to extract the useful representations from the data itself, rather than the structure of data, which receives scarce attention in representation learning. Motivated by the great success of Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) in encoding the graph structure, we propose a Structural Deep Clustering Network (SDCN) to integrate the structural information into deep clustering. Specifically, we design a delivery operator to transfer the representations learned by autoencoder to the corresponding GCN layer, and a dual self-supervised mechanism to unify these two different deep neural architectures and guide the update of the whole model. In this way, the multiple structures of data, from low-order to high-order, are naturally combined with the multiple representations learned by autoencoder. Furthermore, we theoretically analyze the delivery operator, i.e., with the delivery operator, GCN improves the autoencoder-specific representation as a high-order graph regularization constraint and autoencoder helps alleviate the over-smoothing problem in GCN. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate that our propose model can consistently perform better over the state-of-the-art techniques.

Classical object detection methods only extract the objects' image features via CNN, lack of utilizing the relationship among objects in the same image. In this article, we introduce the graph convolutional networks (GCN) into the object detection field and propose a new framework called OD-GCN (object detection with graph convolutional network). It utilizes the category relationship to improve the detection precision. We set up a knowledge graph to reflect the co-exist relationships among objects. GCN plays the role of post-processing to adjust the output of base object detection models, so it is a flexible framework that any pre-trained object detection models can be used as the base model. In experiments, we try several popular base detection models. OD-GCN always improve mAP by 1-5pp on COCO dataset. In addition, visualized analysis reveals the benchmark improvement is quite reasonable in human's opinion.

In recent years, object detection has experienced impressive progress. Despite these improvements, there is still a significant gap in the performance between the detection of small and large objects. We analyze the current state-of-the-art model, Mask-RCNN, on a challenging dataset, MS COCO. We show that the overlap between small ground-truth objects and the predicted anchors is much lower than the expected IoU threshold. We conjecture this is due to two factors; (1) only a few images are containing small objects, and (2) small objects do not appear enough even within each image containing them. We thus propose to oversample those images with small objects and augment each of those images by copy-pasting small objects many times. It allows us to trade off the quality of the detector on large objects with that on small objects. We evaluate different pasting augmentation strategies, and ultimately, we achieve 9.7\% relative improvement on the instance segmentation and 7.1\% on the object detection of small objects, compared to the current state of the art method on MS COCO.

Accurate detection and tracking of objects is vital for effective video understanding. In previous work, the two tasks have been combined in a way that tracking is based heavily on detection, but the detection benefits marginally from the tracking. To increase synergy, we propose to more tightly integrate the tasks by conditioning the object detection in the current frame on tracklets computed in prior frames. With this approach, the object detection results not only have high detection responses, but also improved coherence with the existing tracklets. This greater coherence leads to estimated object trajectories that are smoother and more stable than the jittered paths obtained without tracklet-conditioned detection. Over extensive experiments, this approach is shown to achieve state-of-the-art performance in terms of both detection and tracking accuracy, as well as noticeable improvements in tracking stability.

Although it is well believed for years that modeling relations between objects would help object recognition, there has not been evidence that the idea is working in the deep learning era. All state-of-the-art object detection systems still rely on recognizing object instances individually, without exploiting their relations during learning. This work proposes an object relation module. It processes a set of objects simultaneously through interaction between their appearance feature and geometry, thus allowing modeling of their relations. It is lightweight and in-place. It does not require additional supervision and is easy to embed in existing networks. It is shown effective on improving object recognition and duplicate removal steps in the modern object detection pipeline. It verifies the efficacy of modeling object relations in CNN based detection. It gives rise to the first fully end-to-end object detector.

While generic object detection has achieved large improvements with rich feature hierarchies from deep nets, detecting small objects with poor visual cues remains challenging. Motion cues from multiple frames may be more informative for detecting such hard-to-distinguish objects in each frame. However, how to encode discriminative motion patterns, such as deformations and pose changes that characterize objects, has remained an open question. To learn them and thereby realize small object detection, we present a neural model called the Recurrent Correlational Network, where detection and tracking are jointly performed over a multi-frame representation learned through a single, trainable, and end-to-end network. A convolutional long short-term memory network is utilized for learning informative appearance change for detection, while learned representation is shared in tracking for enhancing its performance. In experiments with datasets containing images of scenes with small flying objects, such as birds and unmanned aerial vehicles, the proposed method yielded consistent improvements in detection performance over deep single-frame detectors and existing motion-based detectors. Furthermore, our network performs as well as state-of-the-art generic object trackers when it was evaluated as a tracker on the bird dataset.

In a weakly-supervised scenario object detectors need to be trained using image-level annotation alone. Since bounding-box-level ground truth is not available, most of the solutions proposed so far are based on an iterative, Multiple Instance Learning framework in which the current classifier is used to select the highest-confidence boxes in each image, which are treated as pseudo-ground truth in the next training iteration. However, the errors of an immature classifier can make the process drift, usually introducing many of false positives in the training dataset. To alleviate this problem, we propose in this paper a training protocol based on the self-paced learning paradigm. The main idea is to iteratively select a subset of images and boxes that are the most reliable, and use them for training. While in the past few years similar strategies have been adopted for SVMs and other classifiers, we are the first showing that a self-paced approach can be used with deep-network-based classifiers in an end-to-end training pipeline. The method we propose is built on the fully-supervised Fast-RCNN architecture and can be applied to similar architectures which represent the input image as a bag of boxes. We show state-of-the-art results on Pascal VOC 2007, Pascal VOC 2010 and ILSVRC 2013. On ILSVRC 2013 our results based on a low-capacity AlexNet network outperform even those weakly-supervised approaches which are based on much higher-capacity networks.

Owing to effective and flexible data acquisition, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has recently become a hotspot across the fields of computer vision (CV) and remote sensing (RS). Inspired by recent success of deep learning (DL), many advanced object detection and tracking approaches have been widely applied to various UAV-related tasks, such as environmental monitoring, precision agriculture, traffic management. This paper provides a comprehensive survey on the research progress and prospects of DL-based UAV object detection and tracking methods. More specifically, we first outline the challenges, statistics of existing methods, and provide solutions from the perspectives of DL-based models in three research topics: object detection from the image, object detection from the video, and object tracking from the video. Open datasets related to UAV-dominated object detection and tracking are exhausted, and four benchmark datasets are employed for performance evaluation using some state-of-the-art methods. Finally, prospects and considerations for the future work are discussed and summarized. It is expected that this survey can facilitate those researchers who come from remote sensing field with an overview of DL-based UAV object detection and tracking methods, along with some thoughts on their further developments.

The rapid development of facial manipulation techniques has aroused public concerns in recent years. Following the success of deep learning, existing methods always formulate DeepFake video detection as a binary classification problem and develop frame-based and video-based solutions. However, little attention has been paid to capturing the spatial-temporal inconsistency in forged videos. To address this issue, we term this task as a Spatial-Temporal Inconsistency Learning (STIL) process and instantiate it into a novel STIL block, which consists of a Spatial Inconsistency Module (SIM), a Temporal Inconsistency Module (TIM), and an Information Supplement Module (ISM). Specifically, we present a novel temporal modeling paradigm in TIM by exploiting the temporal difference over adjacent frames along with both horizontal and vertical directions. And the ISM simultaneously utilizes the spatial information from SIM and temporal information from TIM to establish a more comprehensive spatial-temporal representation. Moreover, our STIL block is flexible and could be plugged into existing 2D CNNs. Extensive experiments and visualizations are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method against the state-of-the-art competitors.

The detection performance of small objects in remote sensing images is not satisfactory compared to large objects, especially in low-resolution and noisy images. A generative adversarial network (GAN)-based model called enhanced super-resolution GAN (ESRGAN) shows remarkable image enhancement performance, but reconstructed images miss high-frequency edge information. Therefore, object detection performance degrades for small objects on recovered noisy and low-resolution remote sensing images. Inspired by the success of edge enhanced GAN (EEGAN) and ESRGAN, we apply a new edge-enhanced super-resolution GAN (EESRGAN) to improve the image quality of remote sensing images and use different detector networks in an end-to-end manner where detector loss is backpropagated into the EESRGAN to improve the detection performance. We propose an architecture with three components: ESRGAN, Edge Enhancement Network (EEN), and Detection network. We use residual-in-residual dense blocks (RRDB) for both the ESRGAN and EEN, and for the detector network, we use the faster region-based convolutional network (FRCNN) (two-stage detector) and single-shot multi-box detector (SSD) (one stage detector). Extensive experiments on a public (car overhead with context) and a self-assembled (oil and gas storage tank) satellite dataset show superior performance of our method compared to the standalone state-of-the-art object detectors.

Clustering is a fundamental task in data analysis. Recently, deep clustering, which derives inspiration primarily from deep learning approaches, achieves state-of-the-art performance and has attracted considerable attention. Current deep clustering methods usually boost the clustering results by means of the powerful representation ability of deep learning, e.g., autoencoder, suggesting that learning an effective representation for clustering is a crucial requirement. The strength of deep clustering methods is to extract the useful representations from the data itself, rather than the structure of data, which receives scarce attention in representation learning. Motivated by the great success of Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) in encoding the graph structure, we propose a Structural Deep Clustering Network (SDCN) to integrate the structural information into deep clustering. Specifically, we design a delivery operator to transfer the representations learned by autoencoder to the corresponding GCN layer, and a dual self-supervised mechanism to unify these two different deep neural architectures and guide the update of the whole model. In this way, the multiple structures of data, from low-order to high-order, are naturally combined with the multiple representations learned by autoencoder. Furthermore, we theoretically analyze the delivery operator, i.e., with the delivery operator, GCN improves the autoencoder-specific representation as a high-order graph regularization constraint and autoencoder helps alleviate the over-smoothing problem in GCN. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate that our propose model can consistently perform better over the state-of-the-art techniques.

Classical object detection methods only extract the objects' image features via CNN, lack of utilizing the relationship among objects in the same image. In this article, we introduce the graph convolutional networks (GCN) into the object detection field and propose a new framework called OD-GCN (object detection with graph convolutional network). It utilizes the category relationship to improve the detection precision. We set up a knowledge graph to reflect the co-exist relationships among objects. GCN plays the role of post-processing to adjust the output of base object detection models, so it is a flexible framework that any pre-trained object detection models can be used as the base model. In experiments, we try several popular base detection models. OD-GCN always improve mAP by 1-5pp on COCO dataset. In addition, visualized analysis reveals the benchmark improvement is quite reasonable in human's opinion.

In recent years, object detection has experienced impressive progress. Despite these improvements, there is still a significant gap in the performance between the detection of small and large objects. We analyze the current state-of-the-art model, Mask-RCNN, on a challenging dataset, MS COCO. We show that the overlap between small ground-truth objects and the predicted anchors is much lower than the expected IoU threshold. We conjecture this is due to two factors; (1) only a few images are containing small objects, and (2) small objects do not appear enough even within each image containing them. We thus propose to oversample those images with small objects and augment each of those images by copy-pasting small objects many times. It allows us to trade off the quality of the detector on large objects with that on small objects. We evaluate different pasting augmentation strategies, and ultimately, we achieve 9.7\% relative improvement on the instance segmentation and 7.1\% on the object detection of small objects, compared to the current state of the art method on MS COCO.

Accurate detection and tracking of objects is vital for effective video understanding. In previous work, the two tasks have been combined in a way that tracking is based heavily on detection, but the detection benefits marginally from the tracking. To increase synergy, we propose to more tightly integrate the tasks by conditioning the object detection in the current frame on tracklets computed in prior frames. With this approach, the object detection results not only have high detection responses, but also improved coherence with the existing tracklets. This greater coherence leads to estimated object trajectories that are smoother and more stable than the jittered paths obtained without tracklet-conditioned detection. Over extensive experiments, this approach is shown to achieve state-of-the-art performance in terms of both detection and tracking accuracy, as well as noticeable improvements in tracking stability.

Although it is well believed for years that modeling relations between objects would help object recognition, there has not been evidence that the idea is working in the deep learning era. All state-of-the-art object detection systems still rely on recognizing object instances individually, without exploiting their relations during learning. This work proposes an object relation module. It processes a set of objects simultaneously through interaction between their appearance feature and geometry, thus allowing modeling of their relations. It is lightweight and in-place. It does not require additional supervision and is easy to embed in existing networks. It is shown effective on improving object recognition and duplicate removal steps in the modern object detection pipeline. It verifies the efficacy of modeling object relations in CNN based detection. It gives rise to the first fully end-to-end object detector.

While generic object detection has achieved large improvements with rich feature hierarchies from deep nets, detecting small objects with poor visual cues remains challenging. Motion cues from multiple frames may be more informative for detecting such hard-to-distinguish objects in each frame. However, how to encode discriminative motion patterns, such as deformations and pose changes that characterize objects, has remained an open question. To learn them and thereby realize small object detection, we present a neural model called the Recurrent Correlational Network, where detection and tracking are jointly performed over a multi-frame representation learned through a single, trainable, and end-to-end network. A convolutional long short-term memory network is utilized for learning informative appearance change for detection, while learned representation is shared in tracking for enhancing its performance. In experiments with datasets containing images of scenes with small flying objects, such as birds and unmanned aerial vehicles, the proposed method yielded consistent improvements in detection performance over deep single-frame detectors and existing motion-based detectors. Furthermore, our network performs as well as state-of-the-art generic object trackers when it was evaluated as a tracker on the bird dataset.

In a weakly-supervised scenario object detectors need to be trained using image-level annotation alone. Since bounding-box-level ground truth is not available, most of the solutions proposed so far are based on an iterative, Multiple Instance Learning framework in which the current classifier is used to select the highest-confidence boxes in each image, which are treated as pseudo-ground truth in the next training iteration. However, the errors of an immature classifier can make the process drift, usually introducing many of false positives in the training dataset. To alleviate this problem, we propose in this paper a training protocol based on the self-paced learning paradigm. The main idea is to iteratively select a subset of images and boxes that are the most reliable, and use them for training. While in the past few years similar strategies have been adopted for SVMs and other classifiers, we are the first showing that a self-paced approach can be used with deep-network-based classifiers in an end-to-end training pipeline. The method we propose is built on the fully-supervised Fast-RCNN architecture and can be applied to similar architectures which represent the input image as a bag of boxes. We show state-of-the-art results on Pascal VOC 2007, Pascal VOC 2010 and ILSVRC 2013. On ILSVRC 2013 our results based on a low-capacity AlexNet network outperform even those weakly-supervised approaches which are based on much higher-capacity networks.