Multiscale Semantic Guidance Network for Object Detection in VHR Remote Sensing Images

Abstract

With the development of convolutional neural network (CNN), many CNN-based object detection methods have made a remarkable success in very high-resolution (VHR) remote sensing images (RSIs). However, the standard convolution has a fixed receptive field, which makes it deficient in dynamic feature capture; complex backgrounds may also lead to the degradation of detection performance. Accordingly, this letter proposes a novel multiscale semantic guidance network (MSGN) to tackle these problems, wherein, based on the deformable convolution, an improved feature extraction backbone is proposed to capture features dynamically. Moreover, features from different layers are used to ensure the ability for detecting multiscale objects. Furthermore, a multilevel semantic guidance filtering subnetwork is proposed based on the designed backward semantic guidance filtering (BSGF) module, to suppress the complex backgrounds. Experimental results show that the proposed MSGN has stronger robustness and a better accuracy for multiscale object detection, compared with other reference methods.