Improved S2ANet based on attention mechanism for small target detection in remote sensing images
Dongdong Lu, Tie Wenjie, Songlin Lei, Qiu Xiaolan · 2021 CIE International Conference on Radar (Radar) · 2021
Deep learning has achieved remarkable results in the field of target detection and recognition. For small targets in images, image pyramid can be used to fuse multi-scale features to improve detection performance. However, when test on remote sensing images, it is found that some important small goals will still be missed. Aiming at the problems of small target detection in remote sensing images, this paper proposes two S2ANet improved network variants based on the attention mechanism for synthetic aperture radar(SAR) payload and optical payload: for SAR images, CBAM(Convolutional Block Attention Module) attention is added to the backbone network to increase the attention of the feature extraction network for small targets in the channel and space dimensions; For optical images, firstly increase the CBAM channel attention and spatial attention in the backbone, secondly, the SE(Squeeze And Excitation) channel attention is added to the input features before the channel dimension fusion of the pyramid structure, then the attention-enhanced targets are fully integrated through up-sampling and horizontal splicing operations to improve the missed alarm rate and recall rate of small remote sensing targets. Finally, a comparative verification was carried out on the constructed airborne KU-band SAR data set and the optical remote sensing aircraft data set composed of some DOTA1.5 and FAIR1M data sets. The experimental results proved that the designed two variant networks can be used for small remote sensing. There have been certain improvements in the missed alarm rate, accuracy rate, and recall rate of the target.