Michael Thoreau

Michael Thoreau, Frazer Wilson

Access to high resolution satellite imagery has dramatically increased in recent years as several new constellations have entered service. High revisit frequencies as well as improved resolution has widened the use cases of satellite imagery to areas such as humanitarian relief and even Search and Rescue (SaR). We propose a novel remote sensing object detection dataset for deep learning assisted SaR. This dataset contains only small objects that have been identified as potential targets as part of a live SaR response. We evaluate the application of popular object detection models to this dataset as a baseline to inform further research. We also propose a novel object detection metric, specifically designed to be used in a deep learning assisted SaR setting.

Michael Thoreau, Navinda Kottege

Tracking by detection is a common approach to solving the Multiple Object Tracking problem. In this paper we show how learning a deep similarity metric can improve three key aspects of pedestrian tracking on a multiple object tracking benchmark. We train a convolutional neural network to learn an embedding function in a Siamese configuration on a large person re-identification dataset. The offline-trained embedding network is integrated in to the tracking formulation to improve performance while retaining real-time performance. The proposed tracker stores appearance metrics while detections are strong, using this appearance information to: prevent ID switches, associate tracklets through occlusion, and propose new detections where detector confidence is low. This method achieves competitive results in evaluation, especially among online, real-time approaches. We present an ablative study showing the impact of each of the three uses of our deep appearance metric.