Armored Target Detection in Battlefield Environment Based on Top-Down Aggregation Network and Hierarchical Scale Optimization

Abstract

Armored equipment plays a crucial role in the ground battlefield. The fast and accurate detection of enemy armored targets is significant to take the initiative in the battlefield. Comparing to general object detection and vehicle detection, armored target detection in battlefield environment is more challenging due to the long distance of observation and the complicated environment. In this paper, an accurate and robust automatic detection method is proposed to detect armored targets in battlefield environment. Firstly, inspired by Feature Pyramid Network (FPN), we propose a top-down aggregation (TDA) network which enhances shallow feature maps by aggregating semantic information from deeper layers. Then, using the proposed TDA network in a basic Faster R-CNN framework, we explore the further optimization of the approach for armored target detection: for the Region of Interest (RoI) Proposal Network (RPN), we propose a multi-branch RPNs framework to generate proposals that match the scale of armored targets and the specific receptive field of each aggregated layer and design hierarchical loss for the multi-branch RPNs; for RoI Classifier Network (RCN), we apply RoI pooling on the single finest scale feature map and construct a light and fast detection network. To evaluate our method, comparable experiments with state-of-art detection methods were conducted on a challenging dataset of images with armored targets. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in terms of detection accuracy and recall rate.