Sparse anchoring guided high-resolution capsule network for geospatial object detection from remote sensing imagery

Abstract As the optical remote sensing techniques keep developing with a rapid pace, remote sensing images are positively considered in many fields. Accordingly, a great number of algorithms have been exploited for remote sensing image interpretation purposes. Thereinto, object recognition acts as an important ingredient to many applications. However, to achieve highly accurate object recognition is still challengeable caused by the orientation and size diversities, spatial distribution and density variations, shape and aspect ratio irregularities, occlusion and shadow impacts, as well as complex texture and surrounding environment changes. In this paper, a sparse anchoring guided high-resolution capsule network (SAHR-CapsNet) is proposed for geospatial object detection based on remote sensing images. First, formulated with the multibranch high-resolution capsule network architecture assisted by multiscale feature propagation and fusion, the SAHR-CapsNet can extract semantically strong and spatially accurate feature semantics at multiple scales. Second, integrated with the efficient capsule-based self-attention module, the SAHR-CapsNet functions promisingly to attend to target-specific spatial features and informative channel features. Finally, adopted with the capsule-based sparse anchoring network, the SAHR-CapsNet performs efficiently in generating a fixed number of lightweight, high-quality sparse region proposals. Quantitative assessments and comparative analyses on two challenging remote sensing image datasets demonstrate the applicability and effectiveness of the developed SAHR-CapsNet for geospatial object detection applications.