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SMN: Signal Modulation Network for Tiny Object Detection in Remote Sensing Imagery

delete2026-08-07
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PRE
AI
T
Tianwei Zhang
L
Longfei Ren
高连如 (Lianru Gao)
X
Xu Sun
B
Bing Zhang
DOI:10.1109/tip.2026.3719467delete
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Abstract

Abstract

En 中文
Tiny object detection (TOD) in remote sensing imagery remains challenging because foreground signals are extremely weak in deep feature hierarchies and are easily overwhelmed by high-response background interference. To mitigate this observed foreground-background signal modulation imbalance (FBSMI) difficulty, we propose a signal modulation network (SMN) for remote-sensing TOD. SMN comprises two complementary components. First, an adaptive Wiener filter modulator (AWFM) is inserted after backbone stages to suppress background-dominated noise while preserving weak target-related responses at multiple resolutions. Second, we introduce the novel denoising diffusion transformer (DDT), a featurespace conditional diffusion module that operates on detector feature tensors rather than image pixels. DDT generates multiple diffusion-guided semantic feature variants from high-level fused features and expands the local representation space around weak tiny object evidence. Extensive experiments on AI-TOD, SODA-A, DOTAv2.0, and DIOR-R demonstrate that SMN not only effectively mitigates the FBSMI problem, but also improves detection accuracy, particularly for very tiny and tiny objects, compared with state-of-the-art methods.
Keywords:
Deep learning
tiny object detection
remote sensing
signal modulation
diffusion model

Journal

IEEE Transactions on Image Processing cover
IEEE Transactions on Image Processing
IF:
13.7
Papers:
1.0W
Citations:
8.4W

Organization

C
chinese academy of sciences
Scholars:
54.9W
Papers: 44.5W
Citations: 703
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