In this paper, we describe an active learning scheme which performs coarse to fine testing using a multiscale patch-based representation of images to retrieve objects in large satellite image repositories. The proposed hierarchical top-down approach reduces step by step the size of the analysis window, eliminating each time large parts of the images considered as non-relevant. Unlike most object detection methods which requires large training sets and costly offline training, we use an active learning strategy to build a classifier at each level of the hierarchy and we propose an algorithm to propagate automatically the training examples from one level to the other.