Semi-Autonomous Learning Algorithm for Remote Image Object Detection Based on Aggregation Area Instance Refinement

Semi-autonomous learning for object detection has attracted more and more attention in recent years, which usually tends to find only one object instance with the highest score in each image. However, this strategy usually highlights the most representative part of the object instead of the whole object, which may lead to the loss of a lot of important information. To solve this problem, a novel end-to-end aggregate-guided semi-autonomous learning residual network is proposed to perform object detection. Firstly, a progressive modified residual network (MRN) is applied to the backbone network to make the detector more sensitive to the boundary features of the object. Then, an aggregate-based region-merging strategy (ARMS) is designed to select high-quality instances by selecting aggregation areas and merging these regions. The ARMS selects the aggregation areas that are highly related to the object through association coefficient, and then evaluates the aggregation areas through a similarity coefficient and fuses them to obtain high-quality object instance areas. Finally, a regression-locating branch is further developed to refine the location of the object, which can be optimized jointly with regional classification. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method is superior to state-of-the-art methods.