Few-Shot Object Detection on Remote Sensing Images via Shared Attention Module and Balanced Fine-Tuning Strategy

Abstract

Few-shot object detection is a recently emerging branch in the field of computer vision. Recent research studies have proposed several effective methods for object detection with few samples. However, their performances are limited when applied to remote sensing images. In this article, we specifically analyze the characteristics of remote sensing images and propose a few-shot fine-tuning network with a shared attention module (SAM) to adapt to detecting remote sensing objects, which have large size variations. In our SAM, multi-attention maps are computed in the base training stage and shared with the feature extractor in the few-shot fine-tuning stage as prior knowledge to help better locate novel class objects with few samples. Moreover, we design a new few-shot fine-tuning stage with a balanced fine-tuning strategy (BFS), which helps in mitigating the severe imbalance between the number of novel class samples and base class samples caused by the few-shot settings to improve the classification accuracy. We have conducted experiments on two remote sensing datasets (NWPU VHR-10 and DIOR), and the excellent results demonstrate that our method makes full use of the advantages of few-shot learning and the characteristics of remote sensing images to enhance the few-shot detection performance.

Keywords

• object detection
• few-shot learning
• remote sensing images
• attention mechanism