MS-IAF: Multi-Scale Information Augmentation Framework for Aircraft Detection

Aircrafts have been an important object of study in the field of multi-scale image object detection due to their important strategic role. However, the multi-scale detection of aircrafts and their key parts from remote sensing images can be a challenge, as images often present complex backgrounds and obscured conditions. Most of today’s multi-scale datasets consist of independent objects and lack mixed annotations of aircrafts and their key parts. In this paper, we contribute a multi-scale aircraft dataset (AP-DATA) consisting of 7000 aircraft images that were taken in complex environments and obscured conditions. Our dataset includes mixed annotations of aircrafts and their key parts. We also present a multi-scale information augmentation framework (MS-IAF) to recognize multi-scale aircrafts and their key parts accurately. First, we propose a new deep convolutional module ResNeSt-D as the backbone, which stacks scattered attention in a multi-path manner and makes the receptive field more suitable for the object. Then, based on the combination of Faster R-CNN with ResNeSt-D, we propose a multi-scale feature fusion module called BFPCAR. BFPCAR overcomes the attention imbalance problem of the non-adjacent layers of the FPN module by reducing the loss of information between different layers and including more semantic features during information fusion. Based on AP-DATA, a dataset with three types of features, the average precision (AP) of MS-IAF reached 0.884, i.e., 2.67% higher than that of the original Faster R-CNN. The APs of these two modules were improved by 2.32% and 1.39%, respectively. The robustness of our proposed model was validated using the open sourced RSOD remote sensing image dataset, and the best accuracy was achieved.