Object detection has recently experienced substantial progress. Yet, the widely adopted horizontal bounding box representation is not appropriate for ubiquitous oriented objects such as objects in aerial images and scene texts. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective framework to detect multi-oriented objects. Instead of directly regressing the four vertices, we glide the vertex of the horizontal bounding box on each corresponding side to accurately describe a multi-oriented object. Specifically, We regress four length ratios characterizing the relative gliding offset on each corresponding side. This may facilitate the offset learning and avoid the confusion issue of sequential label points for oriented objects. To further remedy the confusion issue for nearly horizontal objects, we also introduce an obliquity factor based on area ratio between the object and its horizontal bounding box, guiding the selection of horizontal or oriented detection for each object. We add these five extra target variables to the regression head of fast R-CNN, which requires ignorable extra computation time. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that without bells and whistles, the proposed method achieves superior performances on multiple multi-oriented object detection benchmarks including object detection in aerial images, scene text detection, pedestrian detection in fisheye images.
Non-maximum suppression (NMS) is widely used in object detection pipelines for removing duplicated bounding boxes. The inconsistency between the confidence for NMS and the real localization confidence seriously affects detection performance. Prior works propose to predict Intersection-over-Union (IoU) between bounding boxes and corresponding ground-truths to improve NMS, while accurately predicting IoU is still a challenging problem. We argue that the complex definition of IoU and feature misalignment make it difficult to predict IoU accurately. In this paper, we propose a novel Decoupled IoU Regression (DIR) model to handle these problems. The proposed DIR decouples the traditional localization confidence metric IoU into two new metrics, Purity and Integrity. Purity reflects the proportion of the object area in the detected bounding box, and Integrity refers to the completeness of the detected object area. Separately predicting Purity and Integrity can divide the complex mapping between the bounding box and its IoU into two clearer mappings and model them independently. In addition, a simple but effective feature realignment approach is also introduced to make the IoU regressor work in a hindsight manner, which can make the target mapping more stable. The proposed DIR can be conveniently integrated with existing two-stage detectors and significantly improve their performance. Through a simple implementation of DIR with HTC , we obtain 51.3% AP on MS COCO benchmark, which outperforms previous methods and achieves state-of-the-art.
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