Automatic multi-class object detection in remote sensing images in
unconstrained scenarios is of high interest for several applications including
traffic monitoring and disaster management. The huge variation in object scale,
orientation, category, and complex backgrounds, as well as the different camera
sensors pose great challenges for current algorithms. In this work, we propose
a new method consisting of a novel joint image cascade and feature pyramid
network with multi-size convolution kernels to extract multi-scale strong and
weak semantic features. These features are fed into rotation-based region
proposal and region of interest networks to produce object detections. Finally,
rotational non-maximum suppression is applied to remove redundant detections.
During training, we minimize joint horizontal and oriented bounding box loss
functions, as well as a novel loss that enforces oriented boxes to be
rectangular. Our method achieves 68.16% mAP on horizontal and 72.45% mAP on
oriented bounding box detection tasks on the challenging DOTA dataset,
outperforming all published methods by a large margin (+6% and +12% absolute
improvement, respectively). Furthermore, it generalizes to two other datasets,
NWPU VHR-10 and UCAS-AOD, and achieves competitive results with the baselines
even when trained on DOTA. Our method can be deployed in multi-class object
detection applications, regardless of the image and object scales and
orientations, making it a great choice for unconstrained aerial and satellite
imagery.

本文提出了一种新方法，即一个新的联合图像级联和特征金字塔网络，用于在遥感图像中提取多尺度的强和弱语义特征，并进行定向边界框的检测和旋转非极大值抑制，提高了模型的性能。同时，该模型还具有对图像和对象尺度和方向的鲁棒性，可在多类物体检测应用程序中部署。