Multi-Oriented Object Detection in High-Resolution Remote Sensing Imagery Based on Convolutional Neural Networks with Adaptive Object Orientation Features

Abstract

In high-resolution earth observation systems, object detection in high spatial resolution remote sensing images (HSRIs) is the key technology for automatic extraction, analysis and understanding of image information. With respect to the multi-angle features of object orientation in HSRIs object detection, this paper presents a novel HSRIs object detection method based on convolutional neural networks (CNN) with adaptive object orientation features. First, an adaptive object orientation regression method is proposed to obtain object regions in any direction. In the adaptive object orientation regression method, five coordinate parameters are used to regress the object region with any direction. Then, a CNN framework for object detection of HSRIs is designed using the adaptive object orientation regression method. Using multiple object detection datasets, the proposed method is compared with some state-of-the-art object detection methods. The experimental results show that the proposed method can more accurately detect objects with large aspect ratios and densely distributed objects than some state-of-the-art object detection methods using a horizontal bounding box, and obtain better object detection results for HSRIs.