Rotation-insensitive and context-augmented object detection in remote sensing images

Most of the existing deep-learning-based methods are difficult to effectively deal with the challenges faced for geospatial object detection such as rotation variations and appearance ambiguity. To address these problems, this paper proposes a novel deep-learning-based object detection framework including region proposal network (RPN) and local-contextual feature fusion network designed for remote sensing images. Specifically, the RPN includes additional multiangle anchors besides the conventional multiscale and multiaspect-ratio ones, and thus can deal with the multiangle and multiscale characteristics of geospatial objects. To address the appearance ambiguity problem, we propose a double-channel feature fusion network that can learn local and contextual properties along two independent pathways. The two kinds of features are later combined in the final layers of processing in order to form a powerful joint representation. Comprehensive evaluations on a publicly available ten-class object detection data set demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.