Survey on Deep Learning in Oriented Object Detection in Remote Sensing Images

Abstract

The objects in remote sensing images have the characteristics of arbitrary direction and dense arrangement, and thus objects can be located and separated more precisely by using inclined bounding boxes in object detection task. Nowadays, oriented object detection in remote sensing images has been widely applied in both civil and military defense fields, which shows great significance in the research and application, and it has gradually become a research hotspot. This paper provides a systematic summary of oriented object detection methods in remote sensing images. Firstly, three widely-used representations of inclined bounding boxes are summarized. Then, the main challenges faced in supervised learning are elaborated from four aspects: feature misalignment, boundary discontinuity, inconsistency between metric and loss and oriented object location. Next, according to the motivations and improved strategies of different methods, the main ideas and advantages and disadvantages of each algorithm are analyzed in detail, and the overall framework of oriented object detection in remote sensing images is summarized. Furthermore, the commonly used oriented object detection datasets in remote sensing field are introduced. Experimental results of classical methods on different datasets are given, and the performance of different methods is evaluated. Finally, according to the challenges of deep learning applied to oriented object detection in remote sensing images tasks, the future research trend in this direction is prospected.

Keywords

• oriented object detection; inclined bounding box; remote sensing images; deep learning