A Novel Adaptive Edge Aggregation and Multiscale Feature Interaction Detector for Object Detection in Remote Sensing Images

Abstract

Object detection (OD) in remote sensing (RS) images is an important task in the field of computer vision. OD techniques have achieved impressive advances in recent years. However, complex background interference, large-scale variations, and dense instances pose significant challenges for OD. These challenges may lead to misalignment between features extracted by OD models and the features of real objects. To address these challenges, we explore a novel single-stage detection framework for the adaptive fusion of multiscale features and propose a novel adaptive edge aggregation and multiscale feature interaction detector (AEAMFI-Det) for OD in RS images. AEAMFI-Det consists of an adaptive edge aggregation (AEA) module, a feature enhancement module (FEM) embedded in a context-aware cross-attention feature pyramid network (2CA-FPN), and a pyramid squeeze attention (PSA) module. The AEA module employs an edge enhancement mechanism to guide the network to learn spatial multiscale nonlocal dependencies and solve the problem of feature misalignment between the network’s focus and the real object. The 2CA-FPN employs level-by-level feature fusion to enhance multiscale feature interactions and effectively mitigate the misalignment between the scales of the extracted features and the scales of real objects. The FEM is designed to capture the local and nonlocal contexts as auxiliary information to enhance the feature representation of information interaction between multiscale features in a cross-attention manner. We introduce the PSA module to establish long-term dependencies between multiscale spaces and channels for better interdependency refinement. Experimental results obtained using the NWPU VHR-10 and DIOR datasets demonstrate the superior performance of AEAMFI-Det in object classification and localization.