Optimal Deep Convolutional Neural Network for Vehicle Detection in Remote Sensing Images

Object detection (OD) in remote sensing images (RSI) acts as a vital part in numerous civilian and military application areas, like urban planning, geographic information system (GIS), and search and rescue functions. Vehicle recognition from RSIs remained a challenging process because of the difficulty of background data and the redundancy of recognition regions. The latest advancements in deep learning (DL) approaches permit the design of effectual OD approaches. This study develops an Artificial Ecosystem Optimizer with Deep Convolutional Neural Network for Vehicle Detection (AEODCNN-VD) model on Remote Sensing Images. The proposed AEODCNN-VD model focuses on the identification of vehicles accurately and rapidly. To detect vehicles, the presented AEODCNN-VD model employs single shot detector (SSD) with Inception network as a baseline model. In addition, Multiway Feature Pyramid Network (MFPN) is used for handling objects of varying sizes in RSIs. The features from the Inception model are passed into the MFPN for multiway and multiscale feature fusion. Finally, the fused features are passed into bounding box and class prediction networks. For enhancing the detection efficiency of the AEODCNN-VD approach, AEO based hyperparameter optimizer is used, which is stimulated by the energy transfer strategies such as production, consumption, and decomposition in an ecosystem. The performance validation of the presented method on benchmark datasets showed promising performance over recent DL models.