CGC-NET: Aircraft Detection in Remote Sensing Images Based on Lightweight Convolutional Neural Network

In the past few years, aircraft detection in remote sensing (RS) images has been an important research hotspot, and it is very crucial in plenty of military applications. Based on the high computational cost of the model and numerous parameters, deep convolution neural networks-based algorithms have excellent performance in the aircraft detection task. However, it is still difficult to detect aircraft due to the complex background of RS images, various types of aircraft, and so on. In addition, it is difficult and costly to make labels for satellite-based optical RS images. Consequently, we propose an end-to-end lightweight aircraft detection framework called CGC-NET (a network based on circle grayscale characteristics), which can accurately detect aircraft with a few training samples. There are only a small number of trainable parameters in CGC-NET, which greatly reduces the need for large datasets. Extensive evaluations indicate the excellent performance of CGC-NET, in which the F-score can reach 91.06% and the model size is only 0.88 M. Therefore, CGC-NET can be used to accurately detect aircraft targets simply and effectively.