An Oriented Object Detector for Hazy Remote Sensing Images

Currently, a lot of work is focused on aerial object detection and has achieved good results. Though these methods have achieved promising results on the conventional datasets, it is still challenging to locate objects from the low-quality images captured in adverse weather conditions. Currently, there are limited approaches that combine aerial object detection with hazy conditions, and there are few publicly available datasets for real hazy weather based on aerial images. For this purpose, we propose a dataset HRSI, hazy remote sensing images in the real world, which is mainly divided into three categories: airport, large vehicle, and ship. All images in HRSI are from real hazy conditions. In addition, we propose an object detection model DFENet, a dehazing feature enhancement model for hazy remote sensing images, which is suitable for hazy weather. DFENet consists of a two-branch and a dehazing module. The two-branch structure helps to fully learn hazy and dehazing features. In order to avoid the impact of noise caused by the dehezing module, we also designed a haze-predict module (HPM) to predict the information containing haze in the image. We introduce the cross-fuse module (CFM) to utilize the information of haze to guide the feature fusion of two branches. By utilizing the information of haze, DFENet can dynamically adjust the feature weight in the two-branch to avoid the impact of noise generated by the dehazing module. Compared with traditional object detection methods, DFENet not only has good performance in hazy conditions but also improves performance in clear conditions. We tested DFENet on DOTA, HRSI, and Foggy-DOTA to demonstrate that DFENet performs better under hazy conditions.