AFSPNet: an adaptive feature selection pyramid network for efficient object detection in remote sensing images

In recent studies, remote sensing object detection methods based on deep learning have emerged as a primary concern in environmental monitoring, military investigation, and hazard response. However, many difficulties, such as complex backgrounds, dense target quantities, large-scale variations, and non-uniform distribution, lead to many parameters and complex network structures, thus limiting the accuracy of the detector and slowing the inference speed. To address these issues, we propose a lightweight and efficient object detector for remote sensing images. First, an asymmetric convolution with the visual attention mechanism is reconstructed to decrease the complexity and strengthen the feature representation ability. Then, an adaptive feature selection structure is designed to extract discriminative feature information, which can adaptively model the shapes of objects by introducing deformable convolution to obtain a stronger geometric feature representation. To reduce information loss across different channels and spatial locations, a hybrid receptive field module is also proposed to increase the receptive field model by mixing dilated convolutional layers with different dilation rates. Finally, experimental results on the DIOR dataset show that our approach significantly improves detection accuracy and running speed. (c) 2022 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE)