Local Attention Networks for Occluded Airplane Detection in Remote Sensing Images

Despite the great progress of deep learning and target detection in recent years, the accurate detection of the occluded targets in remote sensing images still remains a challenge. In this letter, we propose a new detection method called local attention networks to improve the detection of occluded airplanes. Following the idea of “divide and conquer,” the proposed method is designed by first dividing an airplane target into four visual parts: head, left/right wings, body, and tail, and then considering the detection as the prediction of the individual key points in each of the visual parts. We further introduce an additional attention branch in the standard detection pipeline to enhance the features and make the model focus on individual parts of a target even if it is only partially visible in the image. Detection results and ablation studies on three remote sensing target detection data sets (including two publicly available ones) demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, especially for occluded airplane targets. In addition, our method outperforms the other state-of-the-art detection methods on these data sets.