On the Robustness of Object Detection Models in Aerial Images

The robustness of object detection models is a major concern when applied to real-world scenarios. However, the performance of most object detection models degrades when applied to images subjected to corruptions, since they are usually trained and evaluated on clean datasets. Enhancing the robustness of object detection models is of utmost importance, especially for those designed for aerial images, which feature complex backgrounds, substantial variations in scales and orientations of objects. This paper addresses the challenge of assessing the robustness of object detection models in aerial images, with a specific emphasis on scenarios where images are affected by clouds. In this study, we introduce two novel benchmarks based on DOTA-v1.0. The first benchmark encompasses 19 prevalent corruptions, while the second focuses on cloud-corrupted images-a phenomenon uncommon in natural pictures yet frequent in aerial photography. We systematically evaluate the robustness of mainstream object detection models and perform numerous ablation experiments. Through our investigations, we find that enhanced model architectures, larger networks, well-crafted modules, and judicious data augmentation strategies collectively enhance the robustness of aerial object detection models. The benchmarks we propose and our comprehensive experimental analyses can facilitate research on robust object detection in aerial images. Codes and datasets are available at: (https://github.com/hehaodong530/DOTA-C)