  The detection performance of small objects in remote sensing images is not
satisfactory compared to large objects, especially in low-resolution and noisy
images. A generative adversarial network (GAN)-based model called enhanced
super-resolution GAN (ESRGAN) shows remarkable image enhancement performance,
but reconstructed images miss high-frequency edge information. Therefore,
object detection performance degrades for small objects on recovered noisy and
low-resolution remote sensing images. Inspired by the success of edge enhanced
GAN (EEGAN) and ESRGAN, we apply a new edge-enhanced super-resolution GAN
(EESRGAN) to improve the image quality of remote sensing images and use
different detector networks in an end-to-end manner where detector loss is
backpropagated into the EESRGAN to improve the detection performance. We
propose an architecture with three components: ESRGAN, Edge Enhancement Network
(EEN), and Detection network. We use residual-in-residual dense blocks (RRDB)
for both the ESRGAN and EEN, and for the detector network, we use the faster
region-based convolutional network (FRCNN) (two-stage detector) and single-shot
multi-box detector (SSD) (one stage detector). Extensive experiments on a
public (car overhead with context) and a self-assembled (oil and gas storage
tank) satellite dataset show superior performance of our method compared to the
standalone state-of-the-art object detectors.
