MRDet: A Multihead Network for Accurate Rotated Object Detection in Aerial Images

Objects in aerial images usually have arbitrary orientations and are densely located over the ground, making them extremely challenge to be detected. Many of the recent developed methods attempt to solve these issues by estimating an extra orientation parameter and placing dense anchors, which will result in high model complexity and computational costs. In this article, we propose an arbitrary-oriented region proposal network (AO-RPN) to generate oriented proposals transformed from horizontal anchors. The AO-RPN is very efficient with only a few amounts of parameters increase than the original RPN. Furthermore, to obtain accurate bounding boxes, we decouple the detection task into multiple subtasks and propose a multihead network to accomplish them. Each head is specially designed to learn the features optimal for the corresponding task, which allows our network to detect objects accurately. We name it multihead rotated object detector (MRDet). We evaluate the performance of the proposed MRDet on two challenging benchmarks, i.e., DOTA and HRSC2016, and compare it with several state-of-the-art methods. Our method achieves very promising results, which clearly demonstrates its effectiveness. Code has been available at <uri>https://github.com/qinr/MRDet</uri>.