Optimized Point Set Representation for Oriented Object Detection in Remote-Sensing Images

How to represent the object more appropriately in oriented object detection is an essential problem to be solved, because there are many solutions for the object represented. It is a relatively novel approach to represent objects as a number of sample points useful for both localization and recognition. However, the current point-set-based representation methods do not effectively supervise all points for learning, and the internal information of the convex hull in the point set cannot be effectively learned. Therefore, this letter proposes point set distance (PSD) loss, which learns set-to-set supervision of objects to effectively represent objects. Besides, most of the current sample selection strategies are based on the Intersection over Union (IoU), but these methods cannot comprehensively measure candidate samples’ quality. To select high-quality point sets, we propose to use the probability distribution of point sets to select the positive samples. Our probabilistic point set sample selection (PPSS) scheme effectively exploits the classification information, regression information, and distribution characteristics of the point set. Experimental results on remote-sensing image datasets, including DOTA, DIOR-R, and HRSC2016, demonstrate the proposed method for arbitrary-oriented object detection achieves consistent and substantial improvements.