Vehicles Detection from Very High Resolution Satellite Imagery for the Development of a Societal Activity Index

This paper evaluates an inductive learning approach classification technique for vehicle detection and enumeration on very high resolution imagery. It tests pre-processing procedures applied to different images in with different atmospheric conditions and automatic detection algorithms for detection and enumeration. This work contributes to the longer term objective that is beyond the scope of this paper to use vehicles counts to derive indicators of societal activity; this for a number of applications including situation assessments in conflict areas. The work uses Ikonos and Quickbird images collected over Baghdad in pre-war situation and during the Iraq conflict of 2003. Very high resolution imagery is an excellent information source to detect vehicles. The enumeration can be carried out using photo-interpretation techniques. However, this is impractical and relatively expensive. Automatic detection is possible. Image pre-processing is needed. * Corresponding author.