OSAD: Open-Set Aircraft Detection in SAR Images
This addresses the robustness issue for SAR image object detection in open environments, which is incremental as it builds on existing detection methods with specific enhancements.
The paper tackles the problem of detecting unknown objects in SAR images by proposing OSAD, an open-set aircraft detector that achieves up to 18.36% absolute gain in average precision for unknown objects while maintaining competitive closed-set performance.
Current mainstream SAR image object detection methods still lack robustness when dealing with unknown objects in open environments. Open-set detection aims to enable detectors trained on a closed set to detect all known objects and identify unknown objects in open-set environments. The key challenges are how to improve the generalization to potential unknown objects and reduce the empirical classification risk of known categories under strong supervision. To address these challenges, a novel open-set aircraft detector for SAR images is proposed, named Open-Set Aircraft Detection (OSAD), which is equipped with three dedicated components: global context modeling (GCM), location quality-driven pseudo labeling generation (LPG), and prototype contrastive learning (PCL). GCM effectively enhances the network's representation of objects by attention maps which is formed through the capture of long sequential positional relationships. LPG leverages clues about object positions and shapes to optimize localization quality, avoiding overfitting to known category information and enhancing generalization to potential unknown objects. PCL employs prototype-based contrastive encoding loss to promote instance-level intra-class compactness and inter-class variance, aiming to minimize the overlap between known and unknown distributions and reduce the empirical classification risk of known categories. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that the proposed method can effectively detect unknown objects and exhibit competitive performance without compromising closed-set performance. The highest absolute gain which ranges from 0 to 18.36% can be achieved on the average precision of unknown objects.