Fast Fourier Convolution Based Remote Sensor Image Object Detection for Earth Observation

Remote sensor image object detection is an important technology for Earth observation, and is used in various tasks such as forest fire monitoring and ocean monitoring. Image object detection technology, despite the significant developments, is struggling to handle remote sensor images and small-scale objects, due to the limited pixels of small objects. Numerous existing studies have demonstrated that an effective way to promote small object detection is to introduce the spatial context. Meanwhile, recent researches for image classification have shown that spectral convolution operations can perceive long-term spatial dependence more efficiently in the frequency domain than spatial domain. Inspired by this observation, we propose a Frequency-aware Feature Pyramid Framework (FFPF) for remote sensing object detection, which consists of a novel Frequency-aware ResNet (F-ResNet) and a Bilateral Spectral-aware Feature Pyramid Network (BS-FPN). Specifically, the F-ResNet is proposed to perceive the spectral context information by plugging the frequency domain convolution into each stage of the backbone, extracting richer features of small objects. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to introduce frequency-domain convolution into remote sensing object detection task. In addition, the BSFPN is designed to use a bilateral sampling strategy and skipping connection to better model the association of object features at different scales, towards unleashing the potential of the spectral context information from F-ResNet. Extensive experiments are conducted for object detection in the optical remote sensing image dataset (DIOR and DOTA). The experimental results demonstrate the excellent performance of our method. It achieves an average accuracy (mAP) without any tricks.