Military Target Detection in Remote Sensing Imagery Based on YOLOv4-Faster

Abstract

The continuing development of remote sensing has resulted in a rapidly increasing number of remote sensing applications. High-resolution remote sensing images are used in various fields in the military. We propose methods for object detection based on remote sensing images. We develop a signal processing method for normalizing remote sensing images to eliminate noise such as fog, haze, and poor lighting. This method further improves detection accuracy and reduces error rates. We develop YOLOv4-faster, an accelerated neural network model based on the YOLO (You-Only-Look-Once) object detection method. YOLOv4-faster outperforms existing networks in terms of execution time and detection performance. We conduct a series of experiments on two public datasets (TGRS-HRRSD and NWPU VHR-10) as well as a dataset containing six military target classes provided by IMINT & Analysis and collected from Google Earth. YOLOv4-faster improves efficiency by utilizing multi-scale operations for the accurate detection of objects of various sizes, especially small objects. The experimental results show improved mAP (mean average precision) performance of the proposed method for object detection in remote sensing images. We thus propose a novel system for automatic object detection for high-resolution remote sensing images.