More Accurate Constraints for Self-Supervised Learning in Remote Sensing Images-Based Object Detection

Self-supervised learning (SSL) automatically generates internal labels by exploring the potential auxiliary task of the network itself, and trains the same model through these annotations to learn the latent representation of the data, which greatly improves the accuracy of object detection in remote sensing images (RSIs). However, most existing methods suffer from guaranteeing the quality of the generated SSL pseudo annotations, and the constructed auxiliary tasks are not detectionoriented, which is difficult to enhance the feature representations that are beneficial for object detection. In this paper, we focus on generating more accurate constraints by excavating the intercorrelation between fully and weakly-supervised learning to improve the performance of object detection in RSIs. Initially, weakly-supervised learning (WSL) assigns the pseudo instancelevel annotations for the high-scoring positive bags to model the detector, which can be regarded as a weakened version of the region proposal network (RPN). Fortunately, RPN can be constrained by the ground truth of bounding boxes in fullysupervised learning (FSL), and the high-quality supervisions it provides are unavailable in any WSL methods. Moreover, we construct a proposal generation module (PGM), which further filters the unreliable bounding boxes, predicted by RPN, to supplement high-quality constraints into the ground truth and SS generated candidate boxes to supervise the optimization of WSL branch. By constructing an interactive learning paradigm of WSL and FSL, the former has more accurate constraints to learn an efficient auxiliary task, while the latter enjoys a richer representation form of data provided by WSL, which is undoubtedly a win-win process. Finally, we cascade the losses of WSL and FSL to further explore the intrinsic correlation between them by sharing the same feature extraction network. Experimental comparisons on DOTA and DIOR datasets demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance than many recent object detection approaches by the significant margin.