Multiscale Semantic Fusion-Guided Fractal Convolutional Object Detection Network for Optical Remote Sensing Imagery

Abstract

Optical remote sensing object detection is a challenging task, because of the complex background interference, ambiguous appearances of tiny objects, densely arranged circumstances, and multiclass object with vaster scale variances and irregular aspect ratios. The performance of object detection is seriously restricted. Thus, in this article, inspired by the anchor-free object detection framework, and aiming to solve these difficulties to improve the optical remote sensing object detection performance, a powerful one-stage detector of multiscale semantic fusion-guided fractal convolution network (MSFC-Net) is proposed. First, facing these strong-coupled semantic relations in each complex scene, a compound semantic feature fusion (CSFF) way is designed for generating an effective semantic description, which is a benefit to pixel-wise object center point interpretation. In addition, it can be easily extended into a semantic segmentation task. Second, in view of accurate multiclass pixel-wise center point predictions based on an effective compound semantic description, a novel fractal convolution (FC) regression layer is designed, which adaptively achieves the regression of multiscale bounding boxes (bboxes) with irregular aspect ratio under no priori information. Third, related to the set up FC regression layer, a specific hybrid loss is designed to make the proposed MSFC-Net converge better. Finally, the extensive experiments on challenge data sets of large-scale dataset for object detection in aerial images (DOTA) and object detection in optical remote sensing images (DIOR) datasets are carried out, and comparisons indicate that the proposed MSFC-Net can perform the remarkable performance than other state-of-the-art one-stage detectors, as it can reach 80.26&#x0025; mean average precision (mAP) and 79.33&#x0025; mF1 on DOTA and 70.08&#x0025; mAP and 73.45&#x0025; mF1 on DIOR. Then, our work is available at <uri>https://github.com/ZhAnGToNG1/MSFC-Net</uri>.