A Fast Orientation Invariant Detector Based on the One-stage Method

Abstract

We propose an object detection method that predicts the orientation bounding boxes (OBB) to estimate objects locations, scales and orientations based on YOLO (You Only Look Once), which is one of the top detection algorithms performing well both in accuracy and speed. Horizontal bounding boxes(HBB), which are not robust to orientation variances, are used in the existing object detection methods to detect targets. The proposed orientation invariant YOLO (OIYOLO) detector can effectively deal with the bird’s eye viewpoint images where the orientation angles of the objects are arbitrary. In order to estimate the rotated angle of objects, we design a new angle loss function. Therefore, the training of OIYOLO forces the network to learn the annotated orientation angle of objects, making OIYOLO orientation invariances. The proposed approach that predicts OBB can be applied in other detection frameworks. In additional, to evaluate the proposed OIYOLO detector, we create an UAV-DAHUA datasets that annotated with objects locations, scales and orientation angles accurately. Extensive experiments conducted on UAV-DAHUA and DOTA datasets demonstrate that OIYOLO achieves state-of-the-art detection performance with high efficiency comparing with the baseline YOLO algorithms.