MSCNet: A Multilevel Stacked Context Network for Oriented Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images

Oriented object detection has recently become a hot research topic in remote sensing because it provides a better spatial expression of oriented target objects. Although research has made considerable progress in this field, the feature of multiscale and arbitrary directions still poses great challenges for oriented object detection tasks. In this paper, a multilevel stacked context network (MSCNet) is proposed to enhance target detection accuracy by aggregating the semantic relationships between different objects and contexts in remote sensing images. Additionally, to alleviate the impact of the defects of the traditional oriented bounding box representation, the feasibility of using a Gaussian distribution instead of the traditional representation is discussed in this paper. Finally, we verified the performance of our work on two common remote sensing datasets, and the results show that our proposed network improved on the baseline.