ABNet: Adaptive Balanced Network for Multiscale Object Detection in Remote Sensing Imagery

Benefiting from the development of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), many excellent algorithms for object detection have been presented. Remote sensing object detection (RSOD) is a challenging task mainly due to: 1) complicated background of remote sensing images (RSIs) and 2) extremely imbalanced scale and sparsity distribution of remote sensing objects. Existing methods cannot effectively solve these problems with excellent detection accuracy and rapid speed. To address these issues, we propose an adaptive balanced network (ABNet) in this article. First, we design an enhanced effective channel attention (EECA) mechanism to improve the feature representation ability of the backbone, which can alleviate the obstacles of complex background on foreground objects. Then, to combine multiscale features adaptively in different channels and spatial positions, an adaptive feature pyramid network (AFPN) is designed to capture more discriminative features. Furthermore, considering that the original FPN ignores rich deep-level features, a context enhancement module (CEM) is proposed to exploit abundant semantic information for multiscale object detection. Experimental results on three public datasets demonstrate that our approach exhibits superior performance over baseline by only introducing less than 1.5M extra parameters.