General Optimization Methods for YOLO Series Object Detection in Remote Sensing Images

The You Only Look Once (YOLO) series of object detection algorithms has attracted considerable attention for its notable advantages in speed and accuracy, resulting in widespread applications in various real-world scenarios. However, achieving outstanding accuracy on remote sensing images with densely arranged small targets and complex backgrounds remains a challenging task. To address this issue, this letter proposes two easily integrated modules suitable for the YOLO architecture, namely global semantic information extraction (GSIE) and adaptive feature fusion (AFF). The GSIE module is designed to overcome the limitation of local information in traditional methods and facilitate global semantic information interaction by introducing multi-angle feature rotation to extend the receptive field. The AFF module effectively captures fine-grained features of objects by dynamically adjusting fusion weights, thereby reducing the loss of deep semantic information during feature transfer and fusion. The experimental results on the VEDAI and LEVIR remote sensing datasets demonstrate that when embedding these two modules into YOLO series algorithms that only use the small-scale detector, there is a significant improvement in performance while reducing computational complexity.