Object detection is used widely in remote sensing image interpretation. Although most models used for object detection have achieved high detection accuracy, computational complexity and low detection speeds limit their application in real-time detection tasks. This study developed an adaptive feature-aware method of object detection in remote sensing images based on the single-shot detector architecture called adaptive feature-aware detector (AFADet). Self-attention is used to extract high-level semantic information derived from deep feature maps for spatial localization of objects and the model is improved in localizing objects. The adaptive feature-aware module is used to perform adaptive cross-scale depth fusion of different-scale feature maps to improve the learning ability of the model and reduce the influence of complex backgrounds in remote sensing images. The focal loss is used during training to address the positive and negative sample imbalance problem, reduce the influence of the loss value dominated by easily classified samples, and enhance the stability of model training. Experiments are conducted on three object detection datasets, and the results are compared with those of the classical and recent object detection algorithms. The mean average precision(mAP) values are 66.12%, 95.54%, and 86.44% for three datasets, which suggests that AFADet can detect remote sensing images in real-time with high accuracy and can effectively balance detection accuracy and speed.

Object detection in remote sensing images faces the challenges of a complex background, large object size variations, and high inter-class similarity. To address these problems, we propose an adaptive adjacent layer feature fusion (AALFF) method, which is developed on the basis of RTMDet. Specifically, the AALFF method incorporates an adjacent layer feature fusion enhancement (ALFFE) module, designed to capture high-level semantic information and accurately locate object spatial positions. ALFFE also effectively preserves small objects by fusing adjacent layer features and employs involution to aggregate contextual information in a wide spatial range for object essential features extraction in complex backgrounds. Additionally, the adaptive spatial feature fusion (ASFF) module is introduced to guide the network to select and fuse the crucial features to improve the adaptability to objects with different sizes. The proposed method achieves mean average precision (mAP) values of 77.1%, 88.9%, and 95.7% on the DIOR, HRRSD, and NWPU VHR-10 datasets, respectively. Notably, our approach achieves mAP₇₅ values of 60.8% and 79.0% on the DIOR and HRRSD datasets, respectively, surpassing the state-of-the-art performance on the DIOR dataset.