Learning Point-Guided Localization for Detection in Remote Sensing Images

Object detection in remote sensing images is challenging due to the dense distribution and arbitrary angle of the objects. It is a consensus that the oriented bounding box (OBB) is more suitable to represent the aerial objects. However, there are some extreme cases in regression-based OBB detection that make the regression target discontinuous, resulting in the poor performance. In this article, an analysis of the formats of OBB and the problems in its regression is presented, following with an exploration of transform localization from regression to keypoint estimation, which could be applied to avoid the problem of discontinuous regression target. Our novel method is called Object-wise Point-guided Localization Detector (OPLD). Continuously, a new prediction of center-point is introduced to refine the results, as the truncation problem caused by the cut graph. Lastly, in order to figure the problem of inconsistency between the localization quality and the classification score, both the endpoint scores and the classification score are adopted weighting as a result score. Experimental results are based on two widely used datasets, i.e., DOTA and HRSC2016. OPLD achieve 76.43% mAP and 78.35% mAP in OBB and horizontal bounding boxes tasks of DOTA-v1.0, which achieves state-of-the-art performance, respectively. Project page at https://github.com/yf19970118/OPLD-Pytorch.