Multiple Attention Mechanism Enhanced YOLOX for Remote Sensing Object Detection

The object detection technologies of remote sensing are widely used in various fields, such as environmental monitoring, geological disaster investigation, urban planning, and military defense. However, the detection algorithms lack the robustness to detect tiny objects against complex backgrounds. In this paper, we propose a Multiple Attention Mechanism Enhanced YOLOX (MAME-YOLOX) algorithm to address the above problem. Firstly, the CBAM attention mechanism is introduced into the backbone of the YOLOX, so that the detection network can focus on the saliency information. Secondly, to identify the high-level semantic information and enhance the perception of local geometric feature information, the Swin Transformer is integrated into the YOLOX’s neck module. Finally, instead of GIOU loss, CIoU loss is adopted to measure the bounding box regression loss, which can prevent the GIoU from degenerating into IoU. The experimental results of three publicly available remote sensing datasets, namely, AIBD, HRRSD, and DIOR, show that the algorithm proposed possesses better performance, both in relation to quantitative and qualitative aspects.