Differential Morphological Profile Neural Network for Object Detection in Overhead Imagery

Deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN) have been the dominant methodology in the field of computer vision over the last decade, using various architectural organizations of successive convolutional layers to extract and assemble low level image features into visual component detectors. One of the tradeoffs that have been made as the community has migrated to deep neural models is the loss of explainability and understanding of which salient visual components are being recognized by a model for a particular task. However, there exists a significant heritage in the remote sensing community that has developed advanced algorithms to analyze the signal and structural characteristics of anthropogenic features. One such approach is the use of morphological image processing techniques to extract objects from imagery and aid in the structural analysis of shapes. In particular, the differential morphological profile (DMP) has had great success extracting object shapes, while naturally grouping the extracted shapes into scale ranges. In this research, we present a novel architecture that integrates an explicit (definable and explainable) scaled object extraction into the network architecture, allowing shallower convolutional layers and lower complexity neural models. The architecture is evaluated on a challenging remote sensing dataset of object classes, providing insights to this approach and illuminating future directions of integrating morphology into neural architectures for enhanced explainability.