IENet: Interacting Embranchment One Stage Anchor Free Detector for Orientation Aerial Object Detection

Object detection in aerial images is a challenging task due to its lack of visiable features and variant orientation of objects. Currently, amount of R-CNN framework based detectors have made significant progress in predicting targets by horizontal bounding boxes (HBB) and oriented bounding boxes (OBB). However, there is still open space for one-stage anchor free solutions. This paper proposes a one-stage anchor free detector for orientional object in aerial images, which is built upon a per-pixel prediction fashion detector. We make it possible by developing a branch interacting module with a self-attention mechanism to fuse features from classification and box regression branchs. Moreover a geometric transformation is employed in angle prediction to make it more manageable for the prediction network. We also introduce an IOU loss for OBB detection, which is more efficient than regular polygon IOU. The propsed method is evaluated on DOTA and HRSC2016 datasets, and the outcomes show the higher OBB detection performance from our propsed IENet when compared with the state-of-the-art detectors.