Airplane localization in satellite images by using visual attention

Automatic target detection from the satellite images is an important tool for various applications including mapping, city planning and defense industry. In this paper, we propose a new two-stage method to identify the airplane regions in the airport images by using visual attention. In the first stage, the interesting patches in the image is aimed to extract from the high resolution images. For that purpose, Itti-Koch visual attention model which is inspired from human vision system is used. In the second stage, the important regions containing airplane in the images are extracted from the patches obtained in the first stage. In that stage, Itti-Koch model is applied to emphasis airplane regions in image patches by utilizing an airplane query image. The experimental results show that the proposed approach is successful to localize the airplane regions from the high resolution satellite images.