Oriented Object Detection in Aerial Images Based on Area Ratio of Parallelogram.

Rotated object detection is a challenging task in aerial images as the object in aerial images are displayed in arbitrary directions and usually densely packed. Although considerable progress has been made, there are still challenges that existing regression-based rotation detectors suffer the problem of discontinuous boundaries, which is directly caused by angular periodicity or corner ordering. In this paper, we propose a simple effective framework to address the above challenges. Instead of directly regressing the five parameters (coordinates of the central point, width, height, and rotation angle) or the four vertices, we use the area ratio of parallelogram (ARP) to accurately describe a multi-oriented object. Specifically, we regress coordinates of center point, height and width of minimum circumscribed rectangle of oriented object and three area ratios {\lambda}_1, {\lambda}_2 and {\lambda}_3. This may facilitate the offset learning and avoid the issue of angular periodicity or label points sequence for oriented objects. To further remedy the confusion issue nearly horizontal objects, we employ the area ratio between the object and its horizontal bounding box (minimum circumscribed rectangle) to guide the selection of horizontal or oriented detection for each object. We also propose a rotation efficient IoU loss (R-EIoU) to connect the horizontal bounding box with the three area ratios and improve the accurate for the rotating bounding box. Experimental results on three remote sensing datasets including HRSC2016, DOTA and UCAS-AOD and scene text including ICDAR2015 show that our method achieves superior detection performance compared with many state-of-the-art approaches. The code and model will be coming with paper published.