Multi-scale Target Detection Algorithm of Optical Remote Sensing Image Based on Improved YOLOv8

Abstract. With the progress of remote sensing sensors, the quality of optical remote sensing image is significantly improved, and target detection on it can extract rich feature information. However, due to the characteristics of remote sensing image with various target sizes and a large proportion of the number of small targets, increasing the difficulty in target detection for it. In response to this challenge, this paper proposes an improved YOLOv8 algorithm for multi-scale target detection of optical remote sensing images. First, we propose a PSPPF module, which improves the model's ability to adapt to different data distributions; Second, DSConv is introduced into the Backbone structure of YOLOv8 to reduce the complexity of the network while maintaining the performance of model detection; Finally, we replace the original loss function CIoU with MPDIoU to improve the localization accuracy of the prediction box. Applying the improved algorithm to the public dataset NWPU VHR-10, the mAP value of the our algorithm is 95.1%, which is 3.0% higher than that of the original YOLOv8, indicating that the proposed algorithm is able to effectively detect multi-scale targets in optical remote sensing images.