Collaborative Learning-Based Network for Weakly Supervised Remote Sensing Object Detection

Existing object detection algorithms rely excessively on instance-level labels, which are both time-consuming and expensive. In particular, for remote sensing images (RSIs) with small and dense objects, the labeling cost is much higher than that of general images. Moreover, the propagation process of the labels over the noisy channel results in blurred and noisy information. To address the problem of obtaining RSI instance-level labels, we aim to propose a collaborative learning-based network for weakly supervised remote sensing object detection (CLN-RSOD). Compared with the state-of-the-art, the proposed model combines the advantages of two object detection sub-networks by jointly training. This improves the model's capability and thereby enhances the detection effect for multiobject in RSI. Moreover, we employ a mask-based proposal refinement algorithm for remote sensing images (MPR-RS) to optimize the candidate boxes. In addition, according to the data distribution characteristics of RSI, we introduce a new joint pooling module in CLN-RSOD to enhance the backbone network's characterization of RSI. Finally, the experimental results on two public remote sensing datasets illustrate that the proposed weakly supervised learning method is superior to other weakly supervised methods and demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed CLN-RSOD.