# SPEANet: Structural Prior Enhanced Attention Network for Parameter-Efficient Remote Sensing Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26064 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.26064/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [DOTA: A Large-scale Dataset for Object Detection in Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10398/) (2017)
- [Hybrid Task Cascade for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07518/) (2019)
- [Oriented R-CNN for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05699/) (2021)
- [ReDet: A Rotation-equivariant Detector for Aerial Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07733/) (2021)
- [FCOS: A simple and strong anchor-free object detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09214/) (2020)
- [Rethinking Rotated Object Detection with Gaussian Wasserstein Distance Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11952/) (2021)
- [Gliding vertex on the horizontal bounding box for multi-oriented object detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09358/) (2019)
- [Towards Large-Scale Small Object Detection: Survey and Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14096/) (2022)
- [MMRotate: A Rotated Object Detection Benchmark using PyTorch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13317/) (2022)
- [Anchor-free Oriented Proposal Generator for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.01931/) (2021)
- [Automatic Ship Detection of Remote Sensing Images from Google Earth in Complex Scenes Based on Multi-Scale Rotation Dense Feature Pyramid Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.04331/) (2018)
- [Poly Kernel Inception Network for Remote Sensing Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06258/) (2024)
- [Adaptive Rotated Convolution for Rotated Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07820/) (2023)
- [Dynamic Coarse-to-Fine Learning for Oriented Tiny Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08876/) (2023)
- [LWGANet: Addressing Spatial and Channel Redundancy in Remote Sensing Visual Tasks with Light-Weight Grouped Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.10040/) (2025)
- [Measuring the Impact of Rotation Equivariance on Aerial Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09896/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Remote sensing object detection (RSOD) requires compact backbones capable of preserving weak geometric cues under extreme scale variation and background clutter. Fixed structural operators provide complementary contour and frequency responses without introducing learnable operator coefficients. However, directly injecting these responses can amplify content-irrelevant textures, while applying a uniform operator design across the hierarchy may be poorly matched to stage-specific representation requirements. We propose the Structural Prior Enhanced Attention Network (SPEANet), a parameter-efficient RSOD backbone that integrates fixed operators through stage-specific prior extraction and context-conditioned response modulation. SPEANet assigns smoothed contour and multi-order directional modeling to shallow, high-resolution features, while employing a compact approximation-detail interaction mechanism in deeper stages. Learned spatial gates regulate the resulting prior responses before residual fusion. Experiments on five benchmarks, together with evaluations across seven detection frameworks on DOTA-v1.0, achieve a favorable accuracy-parameter trade-off. With Oriented R-CNN, SPEANet achieves 78.55% mAP on DOTA-v1.0, 72.24% mAP on DOTA-v1.5, and 67.30% mAP on DIOR-R using 23.0M total parameters, including a 5.97M-parameter backbone.