Elongated small object detection from remote sensing images using hierarchical scale-sensitive networks

The detection of elongated objects, such as ships, from satellite images has very important application prospects in marine transportation, shipping management, and many other scenarios. At present, the research of general object detection using neural networks has made significant progress. However, in the context of ship detection from remote sensing images, due to the elongated shape of ship structure and the wide variety of ship size, the detection accuracy is often unsatisfactory. In particular, the detection accuracy of small-scale ships is much lower than that of the large-scale ones. To this end, in this paper, we propose a hierarchical scale sensitive CenterNet (HSSCenterNet) for ship detection from remote sensing images. HSSCenterNet adopts a multi-task learning strategy. First, it presents a dual-direction vector to represent the posture or direction of the tilted bounding box, and employs a two-layer network to predict the dual direction vector, which improves the detection block of CenterNet, and cultivates the ability of detecting targets with tilted posture. Second, it divides the full-scale detection task into three parallel sub-tasks for large-scale, medium-scale, and small-scale ship detection, respectively, and obtains the final results with non-maximum suppression. Experimental results show that, HSSCenterNet achieves a significant improved performance in detecting small-scale ship targets while maintaining a high performance at medium and large scales.