Cross Spatial Temporal Fusion Attention for Remote Sensing Object Detection via Image Feature Matching

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel Cross Spatial Temporal Fusion (CSTF) mechanism that improves cross-modal remote sensing image matching by integrating scale-invariant keypoints and reformulating similarity as a classification task, leading to state-of-the-art object detection results.

Contribution

The paper presents a new CSTF method that enhances feature matching across remote sensing modalities by combining keypoint-based correspondence maps with a classification-based similarity measure.

Findings

Achieves state-of-the-art mAP of 90.99% on HRSC2016

Achieves state-of-the-art mAP of 90.86% on DOTA

Maintains real-time inference speed of 12.5 FPS

Abstract

Effectively describing features for cross-modal remote sensing image matching remains a challenging task due to the significant geometric and radiometric differences between multimodal images. Existing methods primarily extract features at the fully connected layer but often fail to capture cross-modal similarities effectively. We propose a Cross Spatial Temporal Fusion (CSTF) mechanism that enhances feature representation by integrating scale-invariant keypoints detected independently in both reference and query images. Our approach improves feature matching in two ways: First, by creating correspondence maps that leverage information from multiple image regions simultaneously, and second, by reformulating the similarity matching process as a classification task using SoftMax and Fully Convolutional Network (FCN) layers. This dual approach enables CSTF to maintain sensitivity to distinctive local features while incorporating broader contextual information, resulting in robust matching across diverse remote sensing modalities. To demonstrate the practical utility of improved feature matching, we evaluate CSTF on object detection tasks using the HRSC2016 and DOTA benchmark datasets. Our method achieves state-of-theart performance with an average mAP of 90.99% on HRSC2016 and 90.86% on DOTA, outperforming existing models. The CSTF model maintains computational efficiency with an inference speed of 12.5 FPS. These results validate that our approach to crossmodal feature matching directly enhances downstream remote sensing applications such as object detection.