DETECTION OF ARTIFICIAL OBJECTS IN REMOTE SENSING IMAGE BASED ON DEEP LEARNING

Abstract. Aiming at multi-class artificial object detection in remote sensing images, the detection framework based on deep learning is used to extract and localize the numerous targets existing in very high resolution remote sensing images. In order to realize rapid and efficient detection of the typical artificial targets on the remote sensing image, this paper proposes an end-to-end multi-category object detection method in remote sensing image based on the convolutional neural network to solve several challenges, including dense objects and objects with arbitrary direction and large aspect ratios. Specifically, in this paper, the feature extraction process is improved by utilizing a more advanced backbone network with deeper layers and combining multiple feature maps including the high-resolution features maps with more location details and low-resolution feature maps with highly-abstracted information. And a Rotating Regional Proposal Network is adopted into the Faster R-CNN network to generate candidate object-like regions with different orientations and to improve the sensitivity to dense and cluttered objects. The rotation factor is added into the regional proposal network to control the generation of anchor box’s angle and to cover enough directions of typical man-made objects. Meanwhile, the misalignment caused by the two quantifications operations in the pooling process is eliminated and a convolution layer is appended before the fully connected layer of the final classification network to reduce the feature parameters and avoid overfitting. Compared with current generic object detection method, the proposed algorithm focus on the arbitrary oriented and dense artificial targets in remote sensing images. After comprehensive evaluation with several state-of-the-art object detection algorithms, our method is proved to be effective to detect multi-class artificial object in remote sensing image. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method combines the powerful features extracted by the improved convolutional neural networks with multi-scale features and rotating region network is more accurate in the public DOTA dataset.