Target detection for remote sensing based on the enhanced YOLOv4 with improved BiFPN

Abstract

To solve problems for false detection, inadequate regression performance of anchor frames, and the inability to detect small targets in traditional multiscale target detection methods based on YOLOv4, we propose a novel target detection framework named as Enhanced YOLOv4. Firstly, our improved BiFPN replaced the original PANet as the feature fusion module, which can achieve multi-scale feature fusion by way of shared weights. Secondly, the channel attention mechanism (CAM) was embedded before the detection head to highlight the correlation between channels so that small targets can be get more attention. At last, to improve the anchor box regression effect and accelerate the training speed of YOLOv4, we improved the net training loss function, in which the original CIoU was replaced by CDIoU. The experimental results on the DOTA dataset validate our improvement. The mAP of our method is 90.88%, and the frame rate reached 58.76 FPS, at the same time, the speed of detection is not affected significantly.