A Cross Stage Partial Network with Strengthen Matching Detector for Remote Sensing Object Detection

Remote sensing object detection is a difficult task because it often requires real-time feedback through numerous objects in complex environments. In object detection, Feature Pyramids Networks (FPN) have been widely used for better representations based on a multi-scale problem. However, the multiple level features cause detectors’ structures to be complex and makes redundant calculations that slow down the detector. This paper uses a single-layer feature to make the detection lightweight and accurate without relying on Feature Pyramid Structures. We proposed a method called the Cross Stage Partial Strengthen Matching Detector (StrMCsDet). The StrMCsDet generates a single-level feature map architecture in the backbone with a cross stage partial network. To provide an alternative way of replacing the traditional feature pyramid, a multi-scale encoder was designed to compensate the receptive field limitation. Additionally, a stronger matching strategy was proposed to make sure that various scale anchors may be equally matched. The StrMCsDet is different from the conventional full pyramid structure and fully exploits the feature map which deals with a multi-scale encoder. Methods achieved both comparable precision and speed for practical applications. Experiments conducted on the DIOR dataset and the NWPU-VHR-10 dataset achieved 65.6 and 73.5 mAP on 1080 Ti, respectively, which can match the performance of state-of-the-art works. Moreover, StrMCsDet requires less computation and achieved 38.5 FPS on the DIOR dataset.