MAK-BRNet: Multi-Scale Adaptive Kernel and Boundary Refinement Network for Remote Sensing Object Detection

Oriented object detection in remote sensing images rapidly evolves as a pivotal technique, driving transformative advancements across geospatial analytics, intelligent transportation systems, and urban infrastructure planning. However, the inherent characteristics of remote sensing objects, including complex background interference, multi-scale variations, and high-density distribution, pose critical challenges to balance detection accuracy and computational efficiency. This paper presents an anchor-free framework that eliminates the intrinsic constraints of anchor-based detectors, specifically the positive–negative sample imbalance and the computationally expensive non-maximum suppression (NMS) process. By effectively integrating adaptive kernel module with boundary refinement network, we achieved lightweight and efficient detection. Our method adaptively generates convolutional kernels tailored for multi-scale objects to extract discriminative features, while utilizing a boundary refinement network to precisely capture oriented bounding boxes. Experiments were carried out on the widely recognized HRSC2016 and DOTA datasets for the oriented bounding box (OBB) task. The proposed approach achieves 90.13% mAP (VOC07 metric) on HRSC2016 with 61.60 M parameters and 158.84 GFLOPS. For the DOTA benchmark, we attain 75.84% mAP with 45.96 M parameters and 131.39 GFLOPs. Our work highlights a lightweight yet powerful architecture that effectively balances accuracy and efficiency, making it particularly suitable for resource-constrained edge platforms.