Feature Enhancement Based Oriented Object Detection in Remote Sensing Images

Since objects in remote sensing imagery often have arbitrary orientations and high densities, the features of small objects are inclined to be contaminated by the background and other instances. To address the issues, we propose a new oriented object detection framework where a series of feature enhancement schemes are implemented so as to improve robustness and accuracy of the detector. Firstly, we design a weighted bidirectional feature pyramid network, which can be used to fuse both high-level semantic features and low-level detail features for effectively handling with multi-scale objects. Accordingly, we apply the convolutional block attention module that exploits both spatial- and channel-wise attention in our detector, and study how to effectively integrate it into the framework for adaptive feature refinement. In the meanwhile, we present a semantic segmentation guided module to generate naive mask, which is used to multiple with pyramid features to filter out background noise and improve feature representation for small objects. The experimental results on two public datasets, i.e., UCAS-AOD and DOTA, validate the effective performance of the proposed method for oriented object detection in remote sensing images.