Instance segmentation with pyramid integrated context for aerial objects.

Aerial objects are more challenging to segment than normal objects, which are usually smaller and have less textural detail. In the process of segmentation, target objects are easily omitted and misdetected, which is problematic. To alleviate these issues, we propose local aggregation feature pyramid networks (LAFPNs) and pyramid integrated context modules (PICMs) for aerial object segmentation. First, using an LAFPN, while strengthening the deep features, the extent to which low-level features interfere with high-level features is reduced, and numerous dense and small aerial targets are prevented from being mistakenly detected as a whole. Second, the PICM uses global information to guide local features, which enhances the network's comprehensive understanding of an entire image and reduces the missed detection of small aerial objects due to insufficient texture information. We evaluate our network with the MS COCO dataset using three categories: airplanes, birds, and kites. Compared with Mask R-CNN, our network achieves performance improvements of 1.7%, 4.9%, and 7.7% in terms of the AP metrics for the three categories. Without pretraining or any postprocessing, the segmentation performance of our network for aerial objects is superior to that of several recent methods based on classic algorithms.