YOLOV4_CSPBi: Enhanced Land Target Detection Model

Abstract

The identification of small land targets in remote sensing imagery has emerged as a significant research objective. Despite significant advancements in object detection strategies based on deep learning for visible remote sensing images, the performance of detecting a small and densely distributed number of small targets remains suboptimal. To address this issue, this study introduces an improved model named YOLOV4_CPSBi, based on the YOLOV4 architecture, specifically designed to enhance the detection capability of small land targets in remote sensing imagery. The proposed model enhances the traditional CSPNet by redefining its channel partitioning and integrating this enhanced structure into the neck part of the YOLO network model. Additionally, the conventional pyramid fusion structure used in the traditional BiFPN is removed. By integrating a weight-based bidirectional multi-scale mechanism for feature fusion, the model is capable of effectively reasoning about objects of various sizes, with a particular focus on detecting small land targets, without introducing a significant increase in computational costs. Using the DOTA dataset as research data, this study quantifies the object detection performance of the proposed model. Compared with various baseline models, for the detection of small targets, its AP performance has been improved by nearly 8% compared with YOLOV4. By combining these modifications, the proposed model demonstrates promising results in identifying small land targets in visible remote sensing images.