Opto-Electronic Engineering, Volume. 49, Issue 4, 210363(2022)

Small object detection based on multi-scale feature fusion using remote sensing images

Liang Ma1,2,3, Yutao Gou1,2,3, Tao Lei1,2、*, Lei Jin1,2, and Yixuan Song1,2,3
Author Affiliations
  • 1Photoelectric Detection Technology Laboratory, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chengdu, Sichuan 610209, China
  • 2Institute of Optics and Electronics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chengdu, Sichuan 610209, China
  • 3University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China
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    Overview: In recent years, with the continuous development of remote sensing optical technology, the acquisition of a large number of high-resolution remote sensing images has promoted the construction of environmental monitoring, animal protection, national defense and military. In numerous remote sensing image visual tasks, remote sensing aircraft detection is of great significance for civil and national defense. Research of the remote sensing small object detection technology is important. Currently, the object detection method based on deep learning has achieved excellent results in large and medium object testing tasks, but the performance and application of remote sensing small object detection are poor. The main reasons are the following: 1) the model is huge, and the real-time is poor; 2) remote sensing image is complicated and the object scale distribution is wide; 3) remote sensing small object detection dataset is extremely lacking.This paper proposes a robust small object detection method based on multi-scale feature fusion using remote sensing images. When the natural image-based pre-training model is directly applied to the remote sensing images, the large number of parameters and excessive down sampling in widely feature extractions may lead to the disappearances of small objects due to feature gaps. Therefore, based on the distribution of all object sizes in the dataset (i.e., prior knowledge), a lightweight feature extraction module is first integrated via dynamic selection mechanism that allows each neuron to adaptively allocate the receptive field size for detection. Meanwhile, the information reflected by various scale features has different amounts and emphasis. To increase the accuracy of image feature expression, the FPN (feature pyramid networks) module based on adaptive feature weighted fusion is applied by using the grouping convolution to group all feature channels without affecting each other. In addition, deep learning needs a large amount of data to drive. Due to the lack of remote sensing small object dataset, we built a remote sensing plane small object dataset, and processed the plane and small-vehicle objects in DOTA dataset to make its distribution of size meet the requirement of small object detection. Experimental results show that compared with most mainstream detection methods, the proposed method achieves better results on DOTA and self-built datasets.

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    Liang Ma, Yutao Gou, Tao Lei, Lei Jin, Yixuan Song. Small object detection based on multi-scale feature fusion using remote sensing images[J]. Opto-Electronic Engineering, 2022, 49(4): 210363

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    Paper Information

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    Received: Nov. 15, 2021

    Accepted: --

    Published Online: May. 24, 2022

    The Author Email: Lei Tao (taoleiyan@ioe.ac.cn)

    DOI:10.12086/oee.2022.210363

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