Object detection is a significant and challenging problem in the study of remote sensing. Since remote sensing images are typically captured with a bird’s-eye view, the aspect ratios of objects in the same category may obey a Gaussian distribution. Generally, existing object detection methods ignore exploring the distribution character of aspect ratios for improving performance in remote sensing tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel Self-Adaptive Aspect Ratio Anchor (SARA) to explicitly explore aspect ratio variations of objects in remote sensing images. To be concrete, our SARA can self-adaptively learn an appropriate aspect ratio for each category. In this way, we can only utilize a simple squared anchor (related to the strides of feature maps in Feature Pyramid Networks) to regress objects in various aspect ratios. Finally, we adopt an Oriented Box Decoder (OBD) to align the feature maps and encode the orientation information of oriented objects. Our method achieves a promising mAP value of 79.91% on the DOTA dataset.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.