HR2SIOD-CL: A Compressed Learning Framework for Object Detection in High-Resolution Remote Sensing Images

Abstract

High-resolution remote sensing object detection is a fundamental task in Earth observation. However, the storage, transmission, and downstream processing of high-resolution images impose substantial bandwidth, memory, and computational burdens. Compressed sensing (CS) samples and compresses the signals simultaneously, thereby reducing data transmission and storage overhead. Unfortunately, most existing CS-based pipelines require explicit image reconstruction before downstream inference, leading to heavy computational overheads and poor scalability for high-resolution remote sensing images (RSIs). This work focuses on post-acquisition image compression and explores algorithmically, rather than from a physical hardware implementation perspective, whether explicit image reconstruction is an indispensable intermediate step prior to object detection. To this end, we propose HR2SIOD-CL, an end-to-end compressed learning (CL) framework that performs object detection directly on CS measurements of high-resolution RSIs without explicit image reconstruction. HR2SIOD-CL integrates an entropy-driven content-aware adaptive sampling strategy and a measurement-domain detection backbone for multi-scale feature extraction. Although jointly optimized during training, the adaptive sampling and detection modules can be decoupled for flexible deployment. For fair comparison, an extra lightweight reconstruction network equipped with a single-step data-consistency correction is constructed as the baseline. Extensive experiments on the NWPU VHR-10 and DIOR datasets show that across various sampling ratios, HR2SIOD-CL surpasses the reconstruction-based detection method when integrated into two-stage detectors, and achieves comparable or superior detection performance to the reconstruction-based counterparts when integrated into single-stage detectors. Meanwhile, its computational overhead and GPU memory consumption are merely 6.97% and 35.74% of those of the reconstruction-based counterpart, respectively. These results indicate that CS measurements can function as an effective intermediate representation for object detection, and explicit image reconstruction is not a prerequisite when detection is the primary objective.