Attention-Free Global Multiscale Fusion Network for Remote Sensing Object Detection

Abstract

Remote sensing object detection (RSOD) encounters challenges in complex backgrounds and small object detection, which are interconnected and unable to address separately. To this end, we propose an attention-free global multiscale fusion network (AGMF-Net). Initially, we present a spatial bias module (SBM) to obtain long-range dependencies as a part of our proposal global information extraction module (GIEM). GIEM efficiently captures the global information, overcoming challenges posed by complex backgrounds. Moreover, we propose multitask enhanced structure (MES) and multitask feature pretreatment (MFP) to enhance the feature representation of multiscale targets, while eliminating the interference from complex backgrounds. In addition, an efficient context decoupled detector (ECDD) is presented to provide distinct features for regression and classification tasks, aiming to improve the efficiency of RSOD. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method achieves superior performance compared with the state-of-the-art detectors. Specifically, AGMF-Net obtains the mean average precision (mAP) of 73.2%, 92.03%, 95.21%, and 94.30% on detection in optical remote sensing images (DIOR), high resolution remote sensing detection (HRRSD), Northwestern Polytechnical University Very High Resolution-10 (NWPU VHR-10), and RSOD datasets, respectively.