Weighted Learnable Recursive Aggregation Network for Visible Remote Sensing Image Detection

With the continuous development of intelligent autonomous aerial vehicles (AAV) technology, efficient and accurate sensing of surrounding objects through onboard sensors has become an important research direction. Among these, the object detection is one of the most common perception techniques, but generic object detection methods have low-detection performance in remote sensing images. To address this, we propose the weighted learnable recursive aggregation detection framework, which aims to improve the detection performance in AAV remote sensing images. The network maintains efficiency while ensuring the accuracy of detection. First, to improve the fusion capability of multiscale characterization of small objects, we design a multichannel weights learnable recursive aggregation network. The network improves the multiscale representation fusion capability by dynamically fusing different layers of scale features while recursively aggregating different layers of features. In addition, we design a multichannel recursive residual fusion mechanism for this framework, which is capable of extracting object feature information at different spatial scales and enhances the ability of multiscale characterization of the object. Then, we migrate the multichannel weights learnable recursive aggregation network to different detection frameworks to verify its generalization. Finally, we perform experimental validation using VisDrone 2019, AI-TOD dataset and comparing it with existing methods. The proposed model improves the mAP@0.5 value by 2.1% over the benchmark model on the VisDrone 2019 dataset. On the AI-TOD dataset, our proposed algorithm improves the mAP@0.5 by 1.7% compared with the benchmark model. Also working on the LLVIP dataset, our algorithm achieves 89.8%.