Although existing anchor-based oriented object detection methods have achieved remarkable results, they require manual preset boxes, which introduce additional hyper-parameters and calculations. These methods often use more complex architectures for better performance, which makes them difficult to deploy on computationally constrained embedded platforms, such as satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles. We aim to design a high-performance algorithm that is simple, fast, and easy to deploy for aerial image detection. In this article, we propose a one-stage anchor-free rotated object detector, FCOSR, that can be deployed on most platforms and uses our well-defined label assignment strategy for the features of the aerial image objects. We use the ellipse center sampling method to define a suitable sampling region for an oriented bounding box (OBB). The fuzzy sample assignment strategy provides reasonable labels for overlapping objects. To solve the problem of insufficient sampling, we designed a multi-level sampling module. These strategies allocate more appropriate labels to training samples. Our algorithm achieves an mean average precision (mAP) of 79.25, 75.41, and 90.13 on the DOTA-v1.0, DOTA-v1.5, and HRSC2016 datasets, respectively. FCOSR demonstrates a performance superior to that of other methods in single-scale evaluation, where the small model achieves an mAP of 74.05 at a speed of 23.7 FPS on an RTX 2080-Ti GPU. When we convert the lightweight FCOSR model to the TensorRT format, it achieves an mAP of 73.93 on DOTA-v1.0 at a speed of 17.76 FPS on a Jetson AGX Xavier device with a single scale.

Ship detection is a challenging task for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. Ships have arbitrary directionality and multiple scales in SAR images. Furthermore, there is a lot of clutter near the ships. Traditional detection algorithms are not robust to these situations and easily cause redundancy in the detection area. With the continuous improvement in resolution, the traditional algorithms cannot achieve high-precision ship detection in SAR images. An increasing number of deep learning algorithms have been applied to SAR ship detection. In this study, a new ship detection network, known as the instance segmentation assisted ship detection network (ISASDNet), is presented. ISASDNet is a two-stage detection network with two branches. A branch is called an object branch and can extract object-level information to obtain positioning bounding boxes and classification results. Another branch called the pixel branch can be utilized for instance segmentation. In the pixel branch, the designed global relational inference layer maps the features to interaction space to learn the relationship between ship and background. The global reasoning module (GRM) based on global relational inference layers can better extract the instance segmentation results of ships. A mask assisted ship detection module (MASDM) is behind the two branches. The MASDM can improve detection results by interacting with the outputs of the two branches. In addition, a strategy is designed to extract the mask of SAR ships, which enables ISASDNet to perform object detection training and instance segmentation training at the same time. Experiments carried out two different datasets demonstrated the superiority of ISASDNet over other networks.

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image classification is a fundamental research direction in image interpretation. With the development of various intelligent technologies, deep learning techniques are gradually being applied to SAR image classification. In this study, a new SAR classification algorithm known as the multiscale convolutional neural network with an autoencoder regularization joint contextual attention network (MCAR-CAN) is proposed. The MCAR-CAN has two branches: the autoencoder regularization branch and the context attention branch. First, autoencoder regularization is used for the reconstruction of the input to regularize the classification in the autoencoder regularization branch. Multiscale input and an asymmetric structure of the autoencoder branch cause the network more to be focused on classification than on reconstruction. Second, the attention mechanism is used to produce an attention map in which each attention weight corresponds to a context correlation in attention branch. The robust features are obtained by the attention mechanism. Finally, the features obtained by the two branches are spliced for classification. In addition, a new training strategy and a postprocessing method are designed to further improve the classification accuracy. Experiments performed on the data from three SAR images demonstrated the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed algorithm.

Labeling data in the field of remote sensing is time-consuming and labor-intensive, making domain adaptation between different domains an urgently needed solution. To address the domain gap between diverse datasets in the remote sensing domain, numerous methods tailored for domain adaptation in high-resolution remote sensing imagery have emerged. Some of the existing methods focus on reducing the domain gap at either the feature level or the pixel level, often overlooking their underlying connection. To tackle this issue, we introduce a prototype-wise contrastive feature alignment paradigm (PCFA) aimed at bridging the representations between the feature and pixel levels. By dynamically updating, we acquire prototype information encompassed by different mini-batches and employ an optimal transport mechanism to reasonably apply the prototype feature distribution in guiding the learning of target domain features. We conduct extensive domain adaptation semantic segmentation (DASS) experiments on the ISPRS Vaihingen and Potsdam datasets, achieving an improvement about 4%~5% in mIoU (mean Intersection over Union) compared to previous methods using the DeepLabV2 framework.

Ship detection in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images has important application value. Sea clutter, complex scenes, a large size change in ships, and the arbitrary directionality of ships make ship detection challenging. With the development of deep learning, many deep learning algorithms have been applied to SAR images. These algorithms need a lot of labeled data for training. It is time-consuming to label SAR data, and the unlabeled data are easy to obtain. It is necessary to use the unlabeled data effectively to improve the performance of the algorithm. In this study, a semisupervised SAR ship detection network, named the semisupervised consistency learning adversarial network (SCLANet), is presented. SCLANet is a two-stage detection network. The local features around the ship can be extracted by the SCLANet, and the features generated from unlabeled data become closer to those generated from labeled data by using adversarial learning. There are two consistency learning modules in SCLANet: noise robustness consistency learning and output encoding consistency learning. Noise robustness consistency learning can increase the robustness of the SCLANet. Maintaining consistency between the noisy results and the original results can train the unlabeled data. In output encoding consistency learning, outputs are mapped to a picture that is fed into an encoder to obtain the intermediate representation embedding. Another embedding is a layer in the main network of the SCLANet. Reducing the error between two embeddings can train the SCLANet with unlabeled data. Two types of consistency learning can be used as pretext tasks for semisupervised learning. Experiments were conducted on two SAR ship datasets. Compared with other algorithms, the SCLANet achieved the highest detection accuracy, indicating that it is more advantageous to use in ship detection.