Improved Oriented Object Detection in Remote Sensing Images Based on a Three-Point Regression Method

Object detection in remote sensing images plays an important role in both military and civilian remote sensing applications. Objects in remote sensing images are different from those in natural images. They have the characteristics of scale diversity, arbitrary directivity, and dense arrangement, which causes difficulties in object detection. For objects with a large aspect ratio and that are oblique and densely arranged, using an oriented bounding box can help to avoid deleting some correct detection bounding boxes by mistake. The classic rotational region convolutional neural network (R2CNN) has advantages for text detection. However, R2CNN has poor performance in the detection of slender objects with arbitrary directivity in remote sensing images, and its fault tolerance rate is low. In order to solve this problem, this paper proposes an improved R2CNN based on a double detection head structure and a three-point regression method, namely, TPR-R2CNN. The proposed network modifies the original R2CNN network structure by applying a double fully connected (2-fc) detection head and classification fusion. One detection head is for classification and horizontal bounding box regression, the other is for classification and oriented bounding box regression. The three-point regression method (TPR) is proposed for oriented bounding box regression, which determines the positions of the oriented bounding box by regressing the coordinates of the center point and the first two vertices. The proposed network was validated on the DOTA-v1.5 and HRSC2016 datasets, and it achieved a mean average precision (mAP) of 3.90% and 15.27%, respectively, from feature pyramid network (FPN) baselines with a ResNet-50 backbone.