How to construct low-altitude aerial image datasets for deep learning

Math Biosci Eng. 2021 Jan 5;18(2):986-999. doi: 10.3934/mbe.2021053.

Abstract

The combination of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) technologies and computer vision makes UAV applications more and more popular. Computer vision tasks based on deep learning usually require a large amount of task-related data to train algorithms for specific tasks. Since the commonly used datasets are not designed for specific scenarios, in order to give UAVs stronger computer vision capabilities, large enough aerial image datasets are needed to be collected to meet the training requirements. In this paper, we take low-altitude aerial image object detection as an example to propose a framework to demonstrate how to construct datasets for specific tasks. Firstly, we introduce the existing low-altitude aerial images datasets and analyze the characteristics of low-altitude aerial images. On this basis, we put forward some suggestions on data collection of low-altitude aerial images. Then, we recommend several commonly used image annotation tools and crowdsourcing platforms for data annotation to generate labeled data for model training. In addition, in order to make up the shortage of data, we introduce data augmentation techniques, including traditional data augmentation and data augmentation based on oversampling and generative adversarial networks.

Keywords: UAVs; aerial image; data augmentation; datasets; deep learning.