Physical-Simulation-Based Dynamic Template Matching Method for Remote Sensing Small Object Detection

Object detection is a fundamental challenge encountered in understanding and analyzing remote sensing images. Many current detection methods struggle to identify objects in remote sensing images due to poor feature saliency, diverse directions, and unique viewing angles of small remote sensing targets. As most remote sensing images are captured through overhead photography, the structural contour features of objects in these images remain relatively stable, such as the cross-shaped structure of the aircraft and the rectangular structure of the vehicle. Therefore, we utilize the physical simulation images as prior knowledge to supplement the invariant structural features of the target, extract the target’s key geometric features through the dynamic matching method, and fuse it with the features extracted by the neural network to detect the remote sensing small target more effectively in this article. We propose a template matching method based on physical simulation images (TMSI) and add it to the modified Darknet-53 (named TMSI-Net) for small target detection. Based on this, we perform specific transformations on existing templates in terms of target scale and direction to achieve better adaptation to the corresponding goals and propose DTMSI-Net with a dynamic template library (Dynamic TMSI-Net). Experiments on several datasets demonstrate that the DTMSI-Net exhibits higher detection accuracy and more stable performance compared with the state-of-the-art methods, 4% and 2.7% higher than the second-ranked model on the VEDAI and NWPU datasets, respectively.