Oriented Objects as pairs of Middle Lines

The detection of oriented objects is frequently appeared in the field of natural scene text detection as well as object detection in aerial images. Traditional detectors for oriented objects are common to rotate anchors on the basis of the RCNN frameworks, which will multiple the number of anchors with a variety of angles, coupled with rotating NMS algorithm, the computational complexities of these models are greatly increased. In this paper, we propose a novel model named Oriented Objects Detection Network O^2-DNet to detect oriented objects by predicting a pair of middle lines inside each target. O^2-DNet is an one-stage, anchor-free and NMS-free model. The target line segments of our model are defined as two corresponding middle lines of original rotating bounding box annotations which can be transformed directly instead of additional manual tagging. Experiments show that our O^2-DNet achieves excellent performance on ICDAR 2015 and DOTA datasets. It is noteworthy that the objects in COCO can be regard as a special form of oriented objects with an angle of 90 degrees. O^2-DNet can still achieve competitive results in these general natural object detection datasets.