scholarly journals From Point to Region: Accurate and Efficient Hierarchical Small Object Detection in Low-Resolution Remote Sensing Images

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (13) ◽  
pp. 2620
Author(s):  
Jingqian Wu ◽  
Shibiao Xu
Keyword(s):  
Remote Sensing ◽  
Object Detection ◽  
Visual Information ◽  
Small Object ◽  
Remote Sensing Images ◽  
Low Resolution ◽  
Practical Applications ◽  
Region Detection ◽  
Key Points ◽  
Small Object Detection

Accurate object detection is important in computer vision. However, detecting small objects in low-resolution images remains a challenging and elusive problem, primarily because these objects are constructed of less visual information and cannot be easily distinguished from similar background regions. To resolve this problem, we propose a Hierarchical Small Object Detection Network in low-resolution remote sensing images, named HSOD-Net. We develop a point-to-region detection paradigm by first performing a key-point prediction to obtain position hypotheses, then only later super-resolving the image and detecting the objects around those candidate positions. By postponing the object prediction to after increasing its resolution, the obtained key-points are more stable than their traditional counterparts based on early object detection with less visual information. This hierarchical approach, HSOD-Net, saves significant run-time, which makes it more suitable for practical applications such as search and rescue, and drone navigation. In comparison with the state-of-art models, HSOD-Net achieves remarkable precision in detecting small objects in low-resolution remote sensing images.

scholarly journals Small Object Detection in Remote Sensing Images Based on Super-Resolution with Auxiliary Generative Adversarial Networks

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (19) ◽  
pp. 3152
Author(s):  
Luc Courtrai ◽  
Minh-Tan Pham ◽  
Sébastien Lefèvre
Keyword(s):  
Remote Sensing ◽  
Object Detection ◽  
Network Architecture ◽  
Super Resolution ◽  
Remote Sensing Data ◽  
Generative Adversarial Networks ◽  
Small Object ◽  
Remote Sensing Images ◽  
Generative Adversarial Network ◽  
Small Object Detection

This article tackles the problem of detecting small objects in satellite or aerial remote sensing images by relying on super-resolution to increase image spatial resolution, thus the size and details of objects to be detected. We show how to improve the super-resolution framework starting from the learning of a generative adversarial network (GAN) based on residual blocks and then its integration into a cycle model. Furthermore, by adding to the framework an auxiliary network tailored for object detection, we considerably improve the learning and the quality of our final super-resolution architecture, and more importantly increase the object detection performance. Besides the improvement dedicated to the network architecture, we also focus on the training of super-resolution on target objects, leading to an object-focused approach. Furthermore, the proposed strategies do not depend on the choice of a baseline super-resolution framework, hence could be adopted for current and future state-of-the-art models. Our experimental study on small vehicle detection in remote sensing data conducted on both aerial and satellite images (i.e., ISPRS Potsdam and xView datasets) confirms the effectiveness of the improved super-resolution methods to assist with the small object detection tasks.

scholarly journals Small-Object Detection in Remote Sensing Images with End-to-End Edge-Enhanced GAN and Object Detector Network

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jakaria Rabbi ◽  
Nilanjan Ray ◽  
Matthias Schubert ◽  
Subir Chowdhury ◽  
Dennis Chao
Keyword(s):  
Remote Sensing ◽  
Object Detection ◽  
Super Resolution ◽  
Detection Performance ◽  
Superior Performance ◽  
Single Shot ◽  
Small Object ◽  
Remote Sensing Images ◽  
Low Resolution ◽  
End To End

The detection performance of small objects in remote sensing images is not satisfactory compared to large objects, especially in low-resolution and noisy images. A generative adversarial network (GAN)-based model called enhanced super-resolution GAN (ESRGAN) shows remarkable image enhancement performance, but reconstructed images miss high-frequency edge information. Therefore, object detection performance degrades for the small objects on recovered noisy and low-resolution remote sensing images. Inspired by the success of edge enhanced GAN (EEGAN) and ESRGAN, we apply a new edge-enhanced super-resolution GAN (EESRGAN) to improve the image quality of remote sensing images and used different detector networks in an end-to-end manner where detector loss is backpropagated into the EESRGAN to improve the detection performance. We propose an architecture with three components: ESRGAN, Edge Enhancement Network (EEN), and Detection network. We use residual-in-residual dense blocks (RRDB) for both the GAN and EEN, and for the detector network, we use the faster region-based convolutional network (FRCNN) (two-stage detector) and single-shot multi-box detector (SSD) (one stage detector). Extensive experiments on car overhead with context and oil and gas storage tank (created by us) data sets show superior performance of our method compared to the standalone state-of-the-art object detectors.

scholarly journals Small-Object Detection in Remote Sensing Images with End-to-End Edge-Enhanced GAN and Object Detector Network

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jakaria Rabbi ◽  
Nilanjan Ray ◽  
Matthias Schubert ◽  
Subir Chowdhury ◽  
Dennis Chao
Keyword(s):  
Remote Sensing ◽  
Object Detection ◽  
Super Resolution ◽  
Detection Performance ◽  
Superior Performance ◽  
Single Shot ◽  
Small Object ◽  
Remote Sensing Images ◽  
Low Resolution ◽  
End To End

The detection performance of small objects in remote sensing images is not satisfactory compared to large objects, especially in low-resolution and noisy images. A generative adversarial network (GAN)-based model called enhanced super-resolution GAN (ESRGAN) shows remarkable image enhancement performance, but reconstructed images miss high-frequency edge information. Therefore, object detection performance degrades for small objects on recovered noisy and low-resolution remote sensing images. Inspired by the success of edge enhanced GAN (EEGAN) and ESRGAN, we apply a new edge-enhanced super-resolution GAN (EESRGAN) to improve the image quality of remote sensing images and use different detector networks in an end-to-end manner where detector loss is backpropagated into the EESRGAN to improve the detection performance. We propose an architecture with three components: ESRGAN, Edge Enhancement Network (EEN), and Detection network. We use residual-in-residual dense blocks (RRDB) for both the ESRGAN and EEN, and for the detector network, we use the faster region-based convolutional network (FRCNN) (two-stage detector) and single-shot multi-box detector (SSD) (one stage detector). Extensive experiments on a public (car overhead with context) and a self-assembled (oil and gas storage tank) satellite dataset show superior performance of our method compared to the standalone state-of-the-art object detectors.

scholarly journals Object Detection in Remote Sensing Images Based on a Scene-Contextual Feature Pyramid Network

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 339 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chaoyue Chen ◽  
Weiguo Gong ◽  
Yongliang Chen ◽  
Weihong Li
Keyword(s):  
Remote Sensing ◽  
Object Detection ◽  
Contextual Information ◽  
Model Performance ◽  
Small Object ◽  
Remote Sensing Images ◽  
Art Object ◽  
Contextual Feature ◽  
Feature Pyramid ◽  
Small Object Detection

Object detection has attracted increasing attention in the field of remote sensing image analysis. Complex backgrounds, vertical views, and variations in target kind and size in remote sensing images make object detection a challenging task. In this work, considering that the types of objects are often closely related to the scene in which they are located, we propose a convolutional neural network (CNN) by combining scene-contextual information for object detection. Specifically, we put forward the scene-contextual feature pyramid network (SCFPN), which aims to strengthen the relationship between the target and the scene and solve problems resulting from variations in target size. Additionally, to improve the capability of feature extraction, the network is constructed by repeating a building aggregated residual block. This block increases the receptive field, which can extract richer information for targets and achieve excellent performance with respect to small object detection. Moreover, to improve the proposed model performance, we use group normalization, which divides the channels into groups and computes the mean and variance for normalization within each group, to solve the limitation of the batch normalization. The proposed method is validated on a public and challenging dataset. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art object detection models.

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