A Framework of Maximum Feature Exploration Oriented Remote Sensing Object Detection

Abstract

Object detection from remote sensing images is an interesting research topic full of theoretical and application values. Compared with generic images, those of remote sensing contain much less distinguishing representation information due to far-away capturing position and limited camera lens resolution, the perpendicular to ground capturing view, almost unacquirable 3-D object structure and serious roof occlusion, and the inherent unimportance of top roof view. Focusing on this intrinsic disadvantage, in this letter, we propose a general framework of accurate remote sensing object localization constructed with the core idea of maximum image feature exploration. This integrated structure is mainly comprised of cascaded tiny patch correlation (CTPC) based feature digging, averaging local patch regression (ALPR) centered coarse location acquisition, and instance segmentation oriented further refinement (ISOFR). All those components are designed to maximize feature digging and usage. We believe this is the first to implement the idea of maximum feature exploration to each corner of object detection architecture. Extensive experiments on challenging aerial image datasets DOTA and NWPU VHR-10 show state-of-the-art performance.