A Lightweight SE-YOLOv3 Network for Multi-Scale Object Detection in Remote Sensing Imagery

Abstract

Current state-of-the-art detectors achieved impressive performance in detection accuracy with the use of deep learning. However, most of such detectors cannot detect objects in real time due to heavy computational cost, which limits their wide application. Although some one-stage detectors are designed to accelerate the detection speed, it is still not satisfied for task in high-resolution remote sensing images. To address this problem, a lightweight one-stage approach based on YOLOv3 is proposed in this paper, which is named Squeeze-and-Excitation YOLOv3 (SE-YOLOv3). The proposed algorithm maintains high efficiency and effectiveness simultaneously. With an aim to reduce the number of parameters and increase the ability of feature description, two customized modules, lightweight feature extraction and attention-aware feature augmentation, are embedded by utilizing global information and suppressing redundancy features, respectively. To meet the scale invariance, a spatial pyramid pooling method is used to aggregate local features. The evaluation experiments on two remote sensing image data sets, DOTA and NWPU VHR-10, reveal that the proposed approach achieves more competitive detection effect with less computational consumption.