OSKDet: Orientation-Sensitive Keypoint Localization for Rotated Object Detection

Rotated object detection is a challenging issue in computer vision field. Inadequate rotated representation and the confusion of parametric regression have been the bottleneck for high performance rotated detection. In this paper, we propose an orientation-sensitive keypoint based rotated detector OSKDet. First, we adopt a set of keypoints to represent the target and predict the keypoint heatmap on ROI to get the rotated box. By proposing the orientation-sensitive heatmap, OSKDet could learn the shape and direction of rotated target implicitly and has stronger modeling capabilities for rotated representation, which improves the localization accuracy and acquires high quality detection results. Second, we explore a new unordered keypoint representation paradigm, which could avoid the confusion of keypoint regression caused by rule based ordering. Furthermore, we propose a localization quality uncertainty module to better predict the classification score by the distribution uncertainty of keypoints heatmap. Experimental results on several public benchmarks show the state-of-the-art performance of OSKDet. Specifically, we achieve an AP of 80.91% on DOTA, 89.98% on HRSC2016, 97.27% on UCAS-AOD, and a F-measure of 92.18% on ICDAR2015, 81.43% on ICDAR2017, respectively.