DAFNe: A One-Stage Anchor-Free Approach for Oriented Object Detection

13 Sep 2021  ·  Steven Lang, Fabrizio Ventola, Kristian Kersting ·

We present DAFNe, a Dense one-stage Anchor-Free deep Network for oriented object detection. As a one-stage model, it performs bounding box predictions on a dense grid over the input image, being architecturally simpler in design, as well as easier to optimize than its two-stage counterparts. Furthermore, as an anchor-free model, it reduces the prediction complexity by refraining from employing bounding box anchors. With DAFNe we introduce an orientation-aware generalization of the center-ness function for arbitrarily oriented bounding boxes to down-weight low-quality predictions and a center-to-corner bounding box prediction strategy that improves object localization performance. Our experiments show that DAFNe outperforms all previous one-stage anchor-free models on DOTA 1.0, DOTA 1.5, and UCAS-AOD and is on par with the best models on HRSC2016.

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Task Dataset Model Metric Name Metric Value Global Rank Result Benchmark
Oriented Object Detection DOTA 1.0 DAFNe (R-101) mAP 76.95 # 8
Oriented Object Detection DOTA 1.0 DAFNe (R-50) mAP 76.73 # 9
Oriented Object Detection DOTA 1.5 DAFNe mAP 71.99 # 3
One-stage Anchor-free Oriented Object Detection HRSC2016 DAFNe mAP 87.76 # 3

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