SOAR: Semi-Supervised Open-Vocabulary Aerial Object Detection via Dual-Aware Enhanced Prior Denoising

Open-Vocabulary Object Detection (OVOD) shows promise in remote sensing (RS), but due to its unique value, there are challenges such as the predominance of background regions, sparse labels, limited semantic information, and difficulties in semi-supervised training. To tackle these challenges, we propose the Semi-Supervised Open-Vocabulary Aerial Object Detection with Dual-Perception Prior Denoising (SOAR), which explicitly models the background embeddings of each scene to indirectly construct foreground priors, thereby capitalizing on the abundant background information present in RS imagery. We further introduce a query enhancement module that integrates language and foreground prior information to enhance the effectiveness of query selection and feature augmentation. During the decoding stage of semi-supervised training, we perform denoising and reconstruction of the foreground priors to generate pseudo-labels that support the training process. Additionally, we address the sparsity of label information through expansion and aggregation techniques, further improving model performance. Experimental evaluations reveal that, in the open-vocabulary object detection task on the DIOR dataset, our method achieves a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 68.5% and Harmonic Mean (HM) of 55.9%, outperforming the previous state-of-the-art model’s mAP of 61.6% and HM of 53.6%. Our approach offers a novel solution to the open-vocabulary challenge in aerial object detection.