MSCANet: A multi-scale context-aware network for remote sensing object detection

With the rapid development of remote sensing technology and the widespread application of remote sensing images, remote sensing object detection has become a hot research direction. However, we observe three primary challenges in remote sensing object detection: scale variations, small objects, and complex backgrounds. To address these challenges, we propose a novel detector, he Multi-Scale Context-Aware Network (MSCANet). First, we introduce a Multi-Scale Fusion Module (MSFM) that provides various scales of receptive fields to extract contextual information of objects at different scales adequately. Second, the Multi-Scale Guidance Module (MSGM) is proposed, which fuses deep and shallow feature maps from multiple scales, reducing the loss of feature information in small objects. Finally, we introduce the Context-Aware DownSampling Module (CADM). It dynamically adjusts context information weights at different scales, effectively reducing interference from complex backgrounds. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed MSCANet achieves superior performance results with mean average precision (mAP) of 97.1% and 73.4% on the challenging RSOD and DIOR datasets, respectively, which indicates that the proposed network is suitable for remote sensing object detection and is of a great reference value.