A Foreground Feature Embedding Network for Object Detection in Remote Sensing Images

Jiahui Wu, Yuanzheng Cai, Tao Wang, Zhiming Luo, Senhua Shan, Zuoyong Li

Abstract: Compared with traditional natural images, remote sensing images (RSIs) typically have high resolution. The objects in the images are densely distributed, with heterogeneous orientation and large scale variation, even among objects of the same class. In recent years, object detection algorithms have made great strides in general images, but they are still difficult to meet the challenges that exist in RSIs. Therefore, we propose a foreground feature embedding network (FFE-Net) for object detection in RSIs. To better grasp the object features in RSIs, we design a foreground feature embedding module (FFEM) to learn the foreground features of the object. This is achieved by introducing an additional semantic segmentation branch and embedding the features in the classification and regression branches. Simultaneously, we propose a modified Gaussian function with focal loss (MGFFL) as a way to eliminate the extra background noise from soft labels, making the learned foreground features more robust. Our experimental results on two publicly available remote sensing image datasets, DOTA-v1.0 and HRSC2016, validate the effectiveness of FFE-Net.