No Arabic abstract
Detection of objects is extremely important in various aerial vision-based applications. Over the last few years, the methods based on convolution neural networks have made substantial progress. However, because of the large variety of object scales, densities, and arbitrary orientations, the current detectors struggle with the extraction of semantically strong features for small-scale objects by a predefined convolution kernel. To address this problem, we propose the rotation equivariant feature image pyramid network (REFIPN), an image pyramid network based on rotation equivariance convolution. The proposed model adopts single-shot detector in parallel with a lightweight image pyramid module to extract representative features and generate regions of interest in an optimization approach. The proposed network extracts feature in a wide range of scales and orientations by using novel convolution filters. These features are used to generate vector fields and determine the weight and angle of the highest-scoring orientation for all spatial locations on an image. By this approach, the performance for small-sized object detection is enhanced without sacrificing the performance for large-sized object detection. The performance of the proposed model is validated on two commonly used aerial benchmarks and the results show our proposed model can achieve state-of-the-art performance with satisfactory efficiency.
Object detection is a challenging task in remote sensing because objects only occupy a few pixels in the images, and the models are required to simultaneously learn object locations and detection. Even though the established approaches well perform for the objects of regular sizes, they achieve weak performance when analyzing small ones or getting stuck in the local minima (e.g. false object parts). Two possible issues stand in their way. First, the existing methods struggle to perform stably on the detection of small objects because of the complicated background. Second, most of the standard methods used hand-crafted features, and do not work well on the detection of objects parts of which are missing. We here address the above issues and propose a new architecture with a multiple patch feature pyramid network (MPFP-Net). Different from the current models that during training only pursue the most discriminative patches, in MPFPNet the patches are divided into class-affiliated subsets, in which the patches are related and based on the primary loss function, a sequence of smooth loss functions are determined for the subsets to improve the model for collecting small object parts. To enhance the feature representation for patch selection, we introduce an effective method to regularize the residual values and make the fusion transition layers strictly norm-preserving. The network contains bottom-up and crosswise connections to fuse the features of different scales to achieve better accuracy, compared to several state-of-the-art object detection models. Also, the developed architecture is more efficient than the baselines.
Arising from the various object types and scales, diverse imaging orientations, and cluttered backgrounds in optical remote sensing image (RSI), it is difficult to directly extend the success of salient object detection for nature scene image to the optical RSI. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end deep network called LV-Net based on the shape of network architecture, which detects salient objects from optical RSIs in a purely data-driven fashion. The proposed LV-Net consists of two key modules, i.e., a two-stream pyramid module (L-shaped module) and an encoder-decoder module with nested connections (V-shaped module). Specifically, the L-shaped module extracts a set of complementary information hierarchically by using a two-stream pyramid structure, which is beneficial to perceiving the diverse scales and local details of salient objects. The V-shaped module gradually integrates encoder detail features with decoder semantic features through nested connections, which aims at suppressing the cluttered backgrounds and highlighting the salient objects. In addition, we construct the first publicly available optical RSI dataset for salient object detection, including 800 images with varying spatial resolutions, diverse saliency types, and pixel-wise ground truth. Experiments on this benchmark dataset demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art salient object detection methods both qualitatively and quantitatively.
Feature pyramids have been proven powerful in image understanding tasks that require multi-scale features. State-of-the-art methods for multi-scale feature learning focus on performing feature interactions across space and scales using neural networks with a fixed topology. In this paper, we propose graph feature pyramid networks that are capable of adapting their topological structures to varying intrinsic image structures and supporting simultaneous feature interactions across all scales. We first define an image-specific superpixel hierarchy for each input image to represent its intrinsic image structures. The graph feature pyramid network inherits its structure from this superpixel hierarchy. Contextual and hierarchical layers are designed to achieve feature interactions within the same scale and across different scales. To make these layers more powerful, we introduce two types of local channel attention for graph neural networks by generalizing global channel attention for convolutional neural networks. The proposed graph feature pyramid network can enhance the multiscale features from a convolutional feature pyramid network. We evaluate our graph feature pyramid network in the object detection task by integrating it into the Faster R-CNN algorithm. The modified algorithm outperforms not only previous state-of-the-art feature pyramid-based methods with a clear margin but also other popular detection methods on both MS-COCO 2017 validation and test datasets.
With the development of remote sensing technology, the acquisition of remote sensing images is easier and easier, which provides sufficient data resources for the task of detecting remote sensing objects. However, how to detect objects quickly and accurately from many complex optical remote sensing images is a challenging hot issue. In this paper, we propose an efficient anchor free object detector, CenterFPANet. To pursue speed, we use a lightweight backbone and introduce the asymmetric revolution block. To improve the accuracy, we designed the FPA module, which links the feature maps of different levels, and introduces the attention mechanism to dynamically adjust the weights of each level of feature maps, which solves the problem of detection difficulty caused by large size range of remote sensing objects. This strategy can improve the accuracy of remote sensing image object detection without reducing the detection speed. On the DOTA dataset, CenterFPANet mAP is 64.00%, and FPS is 22.2, which is close to the accuracy of the anchor-based methods currently used and much faster than them. Compared with Faster RCNN, mAP is 6.76% lower but 60.87% faster. All in all, CenterFPANet achieves a balance between speed and accuracy in large-scale optical remote sensing object detection.
Despite the remarkable advances in visual saliency analysis for natural scene images (NSIs), salient object detection (SOD) for optical remote sensing images (RSIs) still remains an open and challenging problem. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end Dense Attention Fluid Network (DAFNet) for SOD in optical RSIs. A Global Context-aware Attention (GCA) module is proposed to adaptively capture long-range semantic context relationships, and is further embedded in a Dense Attention Fluid (DAF) structure that enables shallow attention cues flow into deep layers to guide the generation of high-level feature attention maps. Specifically, the GCA module is composed of two key components, where the global feature aggregation module achieves mutual reinforcement of salient feature embeddings from any two spatial locations, and the cascaded pyramid attention module tackles the scale variation issue by building up a cascaded pyramid framework to progressively refine the attention map in a coarse-to-fine manner. In addition, we construct a new and challenging optical RSI dataset for SOD that contains 2,000 images with pixel-wise saliency annotations, which is currently the largest publicly available benchmark. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed DAFNet significantly outperforms the existing state-of-the-art SOD competitors. https://github.com/rmcong/DAFNet_TIP20