ViTrans: Inter-Frame Alignment Enhancement for Moving Vehicle Detection in Satellite Videos with Stabilization Offsets

Satellite videos typically employ image registration techniques for video stabilization in order to achieve persistent observation. However, existing methods largely neglect the residual stabilization offsets, particularly when exceeding the physical dimensions of target vehicles, which inevitably causes performance degradation. Furthermore, the detection pipeline struggles with hard-to-discriminate samples that exhibit low contrast, motion blur, or occlusion, while conventional sample assignment strategies fail to address the inherent annotation ambiguity for extremely small objects. We propose an end-to-end method called ViTrans for detecting moving vehicles in satellite video under stabilization offsets. ViTrans consists of three core modules: (1) a feature-aligned stabilization offset correction module (SCM) that mitigates feature misalignment by aligning features between the reference frame and the current frame; (2) a feature adaptive aggregation enhancement module (AAEM) based on vehicle trajectory consistency, which leverages the motion characteristics of objects across consecutive frames to eliminate dynamic clutter and false-alarm artifacts; and (3) a Gaussian distribution-based metric that dynamically adapts to bounding box dimensions, thereby providing more accurate positive sample feedback during model training. Extensive experiments on the VISO and SDM-Car datasets under simulated stabilization offsets demonstrate that ViTrans achieves state-of-the-art performance, improving F1-score by 14.4% on VISO and 6.9% on SDM-Car over existing methods.