As a data-driven approach, deep learning requires a large amount of annotated data for training to obtain a sufficiently accurate and generalized model, especially in the field of computer vision. However, when compared with generic object recognition datasets, aerial image datasets are more challenging to acquire and more expensive to label. Obtaining a large amount of high-quality aerial image data for object recognition and image understanding is an urgent problem. Existing studies show that synthetic data can effectively reduce the amount of training data required. Therefore, in this paper, we propose the first synthetic aerial image dataset for ship recognition, called UnityShip. This dataset contains over 100,000 synthetic images and 194,054 ship instances, including 79 different ship models in ten categories and six different large virtual scenes with different time periods, weather environments, and altitudes. The annotations include environmental information, instance-level horizontal bounding boxes, oriented bounding boxes, and the type and ID of each ship. This provides the basis for object detection, oriented object detection, fine-grained recognition, and scene recognition. To investigate the applications of UnityShip, the synthetic data were validated for model pre-training and data augmentation using three different object detection algorithms and six existing real-world ship detection datasets. Our experimental results show that for small-sized and medium-sized real-world datasets, the synthetic data achieve an improvement in model pre-training and data augmentation, showing the value and potential of synthetic data in aerial image recognition and understanding tasks.

The method of collecting aerial images or videos by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for object search has the advantages of high flexibility and low cost, and has been widely used in various fields, such as pipeline inspection, disaster rescue, and forest fire prevention. However, in the case of object search in a wide area, the scanning efficiency and real-time performance of UAV are often difficult to satisfy at the same time, which may lead to missing the best time to perform the task. In this paper, we design a wide-area and real-time object search system of UAV based on deep learning for this problem. The system first solves the problem of area scanning efficiency by controlling the high-resolution camera in order to collect aerial images with a large field of view. For real-time requirements, we adopted three strategies to accelerate the system, as follows: design a parallel system, simplify the object detection algorithm, and use TensorRT on the edge device to optimize the object detection model. We selected the NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier edge device as the central processor and verified the feasibility and practicability of the system through the actual application of suspicious vehicle search in the grazing area of the prairie. Experiments have proved that the parallel design of the system can effectively meet the real-time requirements. For the most time-consuming image object detection link, with a slight loss of precision, most algorithms can reach the 400% inference speed of the benchmark in total, after algorithm simplification, and corresponding model’s deployment by TensorRT.

Image super-resolution (SR) technology aims to recover high-resolution images from low-resolution originals, and it is of great significance for the high-quality interpretation of remote sensing images. However, most present SR-reconstruction approaches suffer from network training difficulties and the challenge of increasing computational complexity with increasing numbers of network layers. This indicates that these approaches are not suitable for application scenarios with limited computing resources. Furthermore, the complex spatial distributions and rich details of remote sensing images increase the difficulty of their reconstruction. In this paper, we propose the pyramid information distillation attention network (PIDAN) to solve these issues. Specifically, we propose the pyramid information distillation attention block (PIDAB), which has been developed as a building block in the PIDAN. The key components of the PIDAB are the pyramid information distillation (PID) module and the hybrid attention mechanism (HAM) module. Firstly, the PID module uses feature distillation with parallel multi-receptive field convolutions to extract short- and long-path feature information, which allows the network to obtain more non-redundant image features. Then, the HAM module enhances the sensitivity of the network to high-frequency image information. Extensive validation experiments show that when compared with other advanced CNN-based approaches, the PIDAN achieves a better balance between image SR performance and model size.