Rotated points for object detection in remote sensing images

Abstract

Abstract Object detection in remote sensing images poses great challenges due to the dense distribution, arbitrary orientation, and aspect ratio variations of objects. Most of the existing methods rely on aligned convolutional features, which fail to capture the geometric information of objects effectively and result in the inconsistency between the classification score and localization accuracy. Moreover, densely packed objects suffer from spatial feature aliasing caused by the intersection of reception fields between objects. To address this issue, a deformable convolution‐based method named rotated points is proposed, which consists of two modules: a point set loss module and a high‐quality sample assignment module. The point set loss module can extract geometric features of objects in arbitrary directions with fine‐grained point sets for feature representation and introduce outlier penalties to penalize outlier points. The high‐quality sample assignment module measures the classification and localization ability, orientation quality, and point‐wise correlation of point sets comprehensively to enhance the consistency of classification and regression significantly. Experiments on the DOTA and FAIR1M datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves significant improvements over the benchmark model.

Keywords

• convolutional neural nets
• image processing
• object detection