RS-YOLOX: A High-Precision Detector for Object Detection in Satellite Remote Sensing Images

Abstract

Automatic object detection by satellite remote sensing images is of great significance for resource exploration and natural disaster assessment. To solve existing problems in remote sensing image detection, this article proposes an improved YOLOX model for satellite remote sensing image automatic detection. This model is named RS-YOLOX. To strengthen the feature learning ability of the network, we used Efficient Channel Attention (ECA) in the backbone network of YOLOX and combined the Adaptively Spatial Feature Fusion (ASFF) with the neck network of YOLOX. To balance the numbers of positive and negative samples in training, we used the Varifocal Loss function. Finally, to obtain a high-performance remote sensing object detector, we combined the trained model with an open-source framework called Slicing Aided Hyper Inference (SAHI). This work evaluated models on three aerial remote sensing datasets (DOTA-v1.5, TGRS-HRRSD, and RSOD). Our comparative experiments demonstrate that our model has the highest accuracy in detecting objects in remote sensing image datasets.

Keywords

• object detection
• remote sensing image
• attention mechanisms
• feature fusion
• varifocal loss
• Slicing Aided Hyper Inference (SAHI)