Remote Sensing Image Detection Based on YOLOv4 Improvements

Remote sensing image target object detection and recognition are widely used both in military and civil fields. There are many models proposed for this purpose, but their effectiveness on target object detection in remote sensing images is not ideal due to the influence of climate conditions, obstacles and confusing objects presented in images, image clarity, and associated problems with small-target and multi-target detection and recognition. Therefore, how to accurately detect target objects in images is an urgent problem to be solved. To this end, a novel model, called YOLOv4_CE, is proposed in this paper, based on the classical YOLOv4 model with added improvements, resulting from replacing the backbone feature-extraction CSPDarknet53 network with a ConvNeXt-S network, replacing the Complete Intersection over Union (CIoU) loss with the Efficient Intersection over Union (EIoU) loss, and adding a coordinate attention mechanism to YOLOv4, as to improve its remote sensing image detection capabilities. The results, obtained through experiments conducted on two open data sets, demonstrate that the proposed YOLOv4_CE model outperforms, in this regard, both the original YOLOv4 model and four other state-of-the-art models, namely Faster R-CNN, Gliding Vertex, Oriented R-CNN, and EfficientDet, in terms of the mean average precision (mAP) and F1 score, by achieving respective values of 95.03% and 0.933 on the NWPU VHR-10 data set, and 95.89% and 0.937 on the RSOD data set.