TricubeNet: 2D Kernel-Based Object Representation for Weakly-Occluded Oriented Object Detection
This addresses oriented object detection for applications like aerial imagery, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing heatmap-based methods.
The paper tackles oriented object detection by representing objects as 2D Tricube kernels and using visual cues instead of offset regression, achieving effectiveness in tasks like aerial image detection with reduced computational complexity.
We present a novel approach for oriented object detection, named TricubeNet, which localizes oriented objects using visual cues ($i.e.,$ heatmap) instead of oriented box offsets regression. We represent each object as a 2D Tricube kernel and extract bounding boxes using simple image-processing algorithms. Our approach is able to (1) obtain well-arranged boxes from visual cues, (2) solve the angle discontinuity problem, and (3) can save computational complexity due to our anchor-free modeling. To further boost the performance, we propose some effective techniques for size-invariant loss, reducing false detections, extracting rotation-invariant features, and heatmap refinement. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our TricubeNet, we experiment on various tasks for weakly-occluded oriented object detection: detection in an aerial image, densely packed object image, and text image. The extensive experimental results show that our TricubeNet is quite effective for oriented object detection. Code is available at https://github.com/qjadud1994/TricubeNet.