Hierarchical fusion and divergent activation based weakly supervised learning for object detection from remote sensing images

Abstract Object detection and location from remote sensing (RS) images is challenging, computationally expensive, and labor intense. Benefiting from research on convolutional neural networks (CNNs), the performance in this field has improved in the recent years. However, object detection methods based on CNNs require a large number of images with annotation information for training. For object location, these annotations must contain bounding boxes. Furthermore, objects in RS images are usually small and densely co-located, leading to a high cost of manual annotation. We tackle the problem of weakly supervised object detection under such conditions, aiming to learn detectors with only image-level annotations, i.e., without bounding box annotations. Based on the fact that the feature maps of a CNN are localizable, we hierarchically fuse the location information from the shallow feature map with the class activation map to obtain accurate object locations. In order to mitigate the loss of small or densely distributed objects, we introduce a divergent activation module and a similarity module into the network. The divergent activation module is used to improve the response strength of the low-response areas in the shallow feature map. Densely distributed objects in RS images, such as aircraft in an airport, often exhibit a certain similarity. The similarity module is used to improve the feature distribution of the shallow feature map and to suppress background noise. Comprehensive experiments on a public dataset and a self-assembled dataset (which we made publically available) show the superior performance of our method compared to state-of-the-art object detectors.