SSN: Scale Selection Network for Multi-Scale Object Detection in Remote Sensing Images

The rapid growth of deep learning technology has made object detection in remote sensing images an important aspect of computer vision, finding applications in military surveillance, maritime rescue, and environmental monitoring. Nonetheless, the capture of remote sensing images at high altitudes causes significant scale variations, resulting in a heterogeneous range of object scales. These varying scales pose significant challenges for detection algorithms. To solve the scale variation problem, traditional detection algorithms compute multi-layer feature maps. However, this approach introduces significant computational redundancy. Inspired by the mechanism of cognitive scaling mechanisms handling multi-scale information, we propose a novel Scale Selection Network (SSN) to eliminate computational redundancy through scale attentional allocation. In particular, we have devised a lightweight Landmark Guided Scale Attention Network, which is capable of predicting potential scales in an image. The detector only needs to focus on the selected scale features, which greatly reduces the inference time. Additionally, a fast Reversible Scale Semantic Flow Preserving strategy is proposed to directly generate multi-scale feature maps for detection. Experiments demonstrate that our method facilitates the acceleration of image pyramid-based detectors by approximately 5.3 times on widely utilized remote sensing object detection benchmarks.