Generalized few-shot object detection in remote sensing images

• Published in: ISPRS journal of photogrammetry and remote sensing Vol. 195; pp. 353 - 364
• Main Authors: Zhang, Tianyang, Zhang, Xiangrong, Zhu, Peng, Jia, Xiuping, Tang, Xu, Jiao, Licheng
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier B.V 01.01.2023
• Subjects: Generalized few-shot object detection; Metric learning; Remote sensing images; Transfer-learning; Transfer-learning; Generalized few-shot object detection; Remote sensing images; Metric learning
• ISSN: 0924-2716; 1872-8235
• DOI: 10.1016/j.isprsjprs.2022.12.004

Recently few-shot object detection (FSOD) in remote sensing images (RSIs) has drawn increasing attention. However, the current FSOD methods in RSIs merely focus on the detection performance of few-shot novel classes while ignoring the severe degradation of the base class performance. Generalized few-shot object detection (G-FSOD) aims to solve the FSOD problem without forgetting previous knowledge. In this paper, we focus on the G-FSOD in RSIs and propose a Generalized Few-Shot Detector (G-FSDet) that can learn novel knowledge without forgetting. Through the comprehensive analysis of each component in the detector, a novel efficient transfer-learning framework is presented as the foundation of our G-FSDet, which is more suitable for FSOD in remote sensing scenes. Considering the greater intra-class diversity and lower inter-class separability of geospatial objects, we design a metric-based discriminative loss to learn a more discriminative classifier in the few-shot fine-tuning stage. Furthermore, a representation compensation module is proposed to alleviate the catastrophic forgetting problem by decoupling the representation learning of previous and novel knowledge. Extensive experiments on DIOR and NWPU VHR-10.v2 datasets demonstrate that our proposed G-FSDet achieves competitive novel class performance with minor degradation in the base class, reaching state-of-the-art overall performance among all few-shot settings. The source code is available at (https://github.com/RSer-XDU/G-FSDet).