Geospatial Object Detection on High Resolution Remote Sensing Imagery Based on Double Multi-Scale Feature Pyramid Network

Abstract

Object detection on very-high-resolution (VHR) remote sensing imagery has attracted a lot of attention in the field of image automatic interpretation. Region-based convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been vastly promoted in this domain, which first generate candidate regions and then accurately classify and locate the objects existing in these regions. However, the overlarge images, the complex image backgrounds and the uneven size and quantity distribution of training samples make the detection tasks more challenging, especially for small and dense objects. To solve these problems, an effective region-based VHR remote sensing imagery object detection framework named Double Multi-scale Feature Pyramid Network (DM-FPN) was proposed in this paper, which utilizes inherent multi-scale pyramidal features and combines the strong-semantic, low-resolution features and the weak-semantic, high-resolution features simultaneously. DM-FPN consists of a multi-scale region proposal network and a multi-scale object detection network, these two modules share convolutional layers and can be trained end-to-end. We proposed several multi-scale training strategies to increase the diversity of training data and overcome the size restrictions of the input images. We also proposed multi-scale inference and adaptive categorical non-maximum suppression (ACNMS) strategies to promote detection performance, especially for small and dense objects. Extensive experiments and comprehensive evaluations on large-scale DOTA dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, which achieves mean average precision (mAP) value of 0.7927 on validation dataset and the best mAP value of 0.793 on testing dataset.