Remote sensing object detection (RSOD), one of the most fundamental and challenging tasks in the remote sensing field, has received long-standing attention. In recent years, deep learning techniques have demonstrated robust feature representation capabilities and led to a big leap in the development of RSOD techniques. In this era of rapid technical evolution, this article aims to present a comprehensive review of the recent achievements in deep learning-based RSOD methods. More than 300 papers are covered in this review. We identify five main challenges in RSOD, including multiscale object detection, rotated object detection, weak object detection, tiny object detection, and object detection with limited supervision, and systematically review the corresponding methods developed in a hierarchical division manner. We also review the widely used benchmark datasets and evaluation metrics within the field of RSOD as well as the application scenarios for RSOD. Future research directions are provided for further promoting the research in RSOD.

Remote sensing (RS) image scene classification is an important research topic in the RS community, which aims to assign the semantics to the land covers. Recently, due to the strong behavior of convolutional neural network (CNN) in feature representation, the growing number of CNN-based classification methods has been proposed for RS images. Although they achieve cracking performance, there is still some room for improvement. First, apart from the global information, the local features are crucial to distinguish the RS images. The existing networks are good at capturing the global features since the CNNs' hierarchical structure and the nonlinear fitting capacity. However, the local features are not always emphasized. Second, to obtain satisfactory classification results, the distances of RS images from the same/different classes should be minimized/maximized. Nevertheless, these key points in pattern classification do not get the attention they deserve. To overcome the limitation mentioned above, we propose a new CNN named attention consistent network (ACNet) based on the Siamese network in this article. First, due to the dual-branch structure of ACNet, the input data are the image pairs that are obtained by the spatial rotation. This helps our model to fully explore the global features from RS images. Second, we introduce different attention techniques to mine the objects' information from RS images comprehensively. Third, considering the influence of the spatial rotation and the similarities between RS images, we develop an attention consistent model to unify the salient regions and impact/separate the RS images from the same/different semantic categories. Finally, the classification results can be obtained using the learned features. Three popular RS scene datasets are selected to validate our ACNet. Compared with some existing networks, the proposed method can achieve better performance. The encouraging results illustrate that ACNet is effective for the RS image scene classification. The source codes of this method can be found in https://github.com/TangXu-Group/Remote-Sensing-Images-Classification/tree/main/GLCnet.

Image captioning generates a semantic description of an image. It deals with image understanding and text mining, which has made great progress in recent years. However, it is still a great challenge to bridge the “semantic gap” between low-level features and high-level semantics in remote sensing images, in spite of the improvement of image resolutions. In this paper, we present a new model with an attribute attention mechanism for the description generation of remote sensing images. Therefore, we have explored the impact of the attributes extracted from remote sensing images on the attention mechanism. The results of our experiments demonstrate the validity of our proposed model. The proposed method obtains six higher scores and one slightly lower, compared against several state of the art techniques, on the Sydney Dataset and Remote Sensing Image Caption Dataset (RSICD), and receives all seven higher scores on the UCM Dataset for remote sensing image captioning, indicating that the proposed framework achieves robust performance for semantic description in high-resolution remote sensing images.

In recent years, convolutional neural network (CNN)-based methods have been widely used for remote sensing (RS) scene classification tasks and have achieved excellent results. However, CNNs are not good at exploring contextual information, which is essential for fully understanding RS scenes. A new model named transformer attracts researchers’ attention to address this problem, which is skilled in mining the latent contextual information in RS scenes. Nevertheless, since the contents of RS scenes are diverse in type and various in scale, the performance of the original transformer in RS scene classification cannot reach what we expect. In addition, due to the specific self-attention mechanism, the time costs of the transformer are high, which hinders its practicability in the RS community. To overcome the above limitations, we propose a new model named efficient multiscale transformer and cross-level attention learning (EMTCAL) for RS scene classification in this article. EMTCAL combines the advantages of CNN and transformer to mine information within RS scenes fully. First, it uses a multilayer feature extraction module (MFEM) to acquire global visual features and multilevel convolutional features from RS scenes. Second, a contextual information extraction module (CIEM) is proposed to capture rich contextual information from multilevel features. In CIEM, taking the characteristics of RS scenes and the computational complexity into account, we propose an efficient multiscale transformer (EMST). EMST can mine the abundant knowledge with various scales hidden in RS scenes and model their inherent relations at small time costs. Third, a cross-level attention module (CLAM) is developed to aggregate and explore correlations of multilevel features. Finally, a class score fusion module (CSFM) is designed to integrate the contributions of global and aggregated multilevel features for discriminative scene representations. Extensive experiments are conducted on three public RS scene datasets. The positive results demonstrate that our EMTCAL can achieve superior classification performance and outperform many state-of-the-art methods. Our source codes are available in https://github.com/TangXu-Group/Remote-Sensing-Images-Classification/tree/main/EMTCAL .

In recent years, with the development of deep learning (DL), the hyperspectral image (HSI) classification methods based on DL have shown superior performance. Although these DL-based methods have great successes, there is still room to improve their ability to explore spatial-spectral information. In this article, we propose a 3-D octave convolution with the spatial-spectral attention network (3DOC-SSAN) to capture discriminative spatial-spectral features for the classification of HSIs. Especially, we first extend the octave convolution model using 3-D convolution, namely, a 3-D octave convolution model (3D-OCM), in which four 3-D octave convolution blocks are combined to capture spatial-spectral features from HSIs. Not only the spatial information can be mined deeply from the high- and low-frequency aspects but also the spectral information can be taken into account by our 3D-OCM. Second, we introduce two attention models from spatial and spectral dimensions to highlight the important spatial areas and specific spectral bands that consist of significant information for the classification tasks. Finally, in order to integrate spatial and spectral information, we design an information complement model to transmit important information between spatial and spectral attention features. Through the information complement model, the beneficial parts of spatial and spectral attention features for the classification tasks can be fully utilized. Comparing with several existing popular classifiers, our proposed method can achieve competitive performance on four benchmark data sets.