Adaptive Feature Separation Network for Remote Sensing Object Detection

With the development of remote sensing technology, remote sensing object detection has been widely applied in various fields, but it still faces some thorny challenges, such as the following: 1) the complexity of object scale changes in remote sensing images makes it difficult to improve the performance of small object detection and 2) remote sensing images have complex backgrounds and densely arranged small and weak objects, which pose a serious problem of feature interference. To alleviate these challenges, we propose an end-to-end adaptive feature separation network called AFSNet, which includes a scale-aware module (SAM) and a class-aware module (CAM). The SAM mainly enables feature maps of different resolutions to detect objects of different scales. Shallow feature maps mainly suppress the features of large objects they contain to focus on small object detection, while deep feature maps increase the detailed features of large objects they contain to focus on large object detection. The CAM is mainly used to distinguish the features in the feature map by category, separating the features of different categories into different channels, thus mitigating the problem of inter class feature interference, and blocking background interference. The effectiveness of this article has been proven on the NWPU VHR-10, IPIU-M, DIOR, and DOTA2.0 datasets. It can be widely applied in civilian, military, and other fields. Through experimental verification, our AFSNet achieved 97.70% mAP on the NWPU VHR-10 dataset, 78.9% mAP on the DIOR dataset, and 58.22% mAP on the DOTA2.0 dataset. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Xidian-AIGroup190726/AFSNet.