DEDBNet: DoG-enhanced dual-branch object detection network for remote sensing object detection

With the improvement of spatial resolution of remote sensing images, object detection of remote sensing images has gradually become a difficult task. Extracted object features are usually hidden in a large amount of interference information in the background due to the complexity and large area of backgrounds, as well as the multi-scale nature of objects in remote sensing images. Still, many existing background weakening methods face difficulties in practical applications and are prone to high rates of false positives and false negatives. Therefore, remote sensing object detection has become increasingly challenging. To address these challenges, a novel background weakening method called Difference of Gaussian (DoG) to weaken background (DWB) module is proposed. Then, we develop a dual-branch network, named DoG-Enhanced Dual-Branch Object Detection Network (DEDBNet) for Remote Sensing Object Detection. The base branch network is responsible for detecting objects, while the DWB's branch network corrects the detected objects using feature-level attention. To combine the features of these branches, we propose two new methods Self-Mutual-Correcter with Detect heads (SMCD) for corrective learning and Map Channel Attention (MCA) for channel attention. Self-Corrector (SC) enables modification and integration of features, while the Mutual-Corrector (MC) enhances the features and further fuses them. We evaluate our proposed network, DEDBNet, through extensive experiments on four public datasets (DOTA with an mAP of 0.836, DIOR with an mAP of 0.871, NWPU VHR-10 with an mAP of 0.973, and RSOD with an mAP of 0.975). The results demonstrate that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art object detection methods significantly for remote sensing images.