CANet: Centerness-Aware Network for Object Detection in Remote Sensing Images

Recently, feature pyramid has been widely exploited in remote sensing detectors, which greatly alleviates the problem arising from scale variation across objects in remote sensing images. However, these object detectors with feature pyramid give insufficient consideration that objects in remote sensing images usually maintain symmetrical shape. To address this issue, we propose an anchor-free-based detector called Centerness-Aware Network (CANet), which could capture the symmetrical shape of objects in remote sensing images. The kernel structure of CANet is a new Centerness-Aware Model (CAM) that contains three components: Multiscale Centerness Descriptor (MSCD), Centerness Detection Head (CDH), and Feature Selective Module (FSM). Considering that symmetrical objects will maintain a rigid appearance around their center region, three components are integrated into the feature pyramid to extract and utilize the features around the center region. More precisely, the MSCD is embedded into the feature pyramid and highlights the center of current objects through the attention mechanism. Guided by the MSCD, the CDH could accurately capture the center of objects by per-pixel prediction. Furthermore, the FSM is connected to the CDH, which guides the CDH to adaptively select the optimal feature level from the pyramidal features. The selected feature level could describe the best semantic information around the center region, which helps the network progressively fit the symmetrical shape of remote sensing objects. Besides, we also design the hybrid loss function to effectively train CAM in the end-to-end way. The experiments show that our network is competitive with some state-of-the-art detection networks.