Remote Sensing Image Target Detection: Improvement of the YOLOv3 Model with Auxiliary Networks

Remote sensing image target detection is widely used for both civil and military purposes. However, two factors need to be considered for remote sensing image target detection: real-time and accuracy for detecting targets that occupy few pixels. Considering the two above issues, the main research objective of this paper is to improve the performance of the YOLO algorithm in remote sensing image target detection. The reason is that the YOLO models can guarantee both detection speed and accuracy. More specifically, the YOLOv3 model with an auxiliary network is further improved in this paper. Our model improvement consists of four main components. Firstly, an image blocking module is used to feed fixed size images to the YOLOv3 network; secondly, to speed up the training of YOLOv3, DIoU is used, which can speed up the convergence and increase the training speed; thirdly, the Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) is used to connect the auxiliary network to the backbone network, making it easier for the network to notice specific features so that some key information is not easily lost during the training of the network; and finally, the adaptive feature fusion (ASFF) method is applied to our network model with the aim of improving the detection speed by reducing the inference overhead. The experiments on the DOTA dataset were conducted to validate the effectiveness of our model on the DOTA dataset. Our model can achieve satisfactory detection performance on remote sensing images, and our model performs significantly better than the unimproved YOLOv3 model with an auxiliary network. The experimental results show that the mAP of the optimised network model is 5.36% higher than that of the original YOLOv3 model with the auxiliary network, and the detection frame rate was also increased by 3.07 FPS.