Object Detection in Remote Sensing Images with Mask R-CNN

Abstract With the wide applications of remote sensing technology in engineering, the demands of efficient object detection algorithms for remote sensing images have also been significantly increased in recent years. Traditional detection methods have the shortcomings of low accuracy and poor robustness, which is difficult to be applied to remote sensing images with complex background and varieties of objects. Recently, the deep convolutional neural networks have already shown great advances in object detection and outperformed many traditional methods. In this work, we study the performance of a region proposal-based method, Mask R-CNN, for detecting airplane and ship in remote sensing images. Specifically, we add an FPN module to improve the accuracy of small objects detection, and a mask branch is used to describe the shape of objects. In addition, we used a series of data augmentation strategies during training for meeting the CNN’s requirement of training samples diversity. The experimental results show that our model has superior performance in object detection of remote sensing images.