MSA R-CNN: A comprehensive approach to remote sensing object detection and scene understanding

Remote sensing scene understanding is crucial for extracting valuable information from high-resolution images, including object detection and classification. Traditional object detection methods face challenges in handling the diverse scales, orientations, and complex backgrounds present in remote sensing data. In this paper, we propose a novel remote sensing scene understanding system called multiscale-attention R-CNN (MSA R-CNN), which incorporates a super multiscale feature extraction network (SMENet) for enhanced feature extraction from multiscale images, an adaptive dynamic inner lateral (ADIL) connection module to tackle information loss in feature pyramid networks (FPN), and a distributed lightweight attention module (DLAM) to refine feature information processing. Furthermore, a new dataset combining the DIOR and DOTA datasets is introduced to extract the background information of detected objects and evaluate the proposed system’s performance. MSA R-CNN achieved an mAP of 74.37% on the DIOR dataset when the gamma value was set to 0.2 and 81.97% on the DOTA dataset when the gamma value was set to 0.1 with the same learning rate, outperforming state-of-the-art models on both datasets. The proposed system demonstrates significant improvements in both object detection and background information extraction, providing a comprehensive solution for remote sensing scene understanding.