OrientedDiffDet: Diffusion Model for Oriented Object Detection in Aerial Images

Object detection is a fundamental task of remote-sensing image processing. Most existing object detection detectors handle regression and classification tasks through learning from a fixed set of learnable anchors or queries. To simplify object candidates, we propose a denoising diffusion process for remote-sensing image object detection, which directly detects objects from a set of random boxes. During the training phase, the horizontal detection boxes are transformed into oriented detection boxes firstly. Then, the model learns to reverse this transformation process by diffusing from the ground truth-oriented box to a random distribution. During the inference phase, the model incrementally refines a set of randomly generated boxes to produce the final output result. Remarkable results have been achieved using our proposed method. For instance, on commonly used object detection datasets such as DOTA, our approach achieves a mean average precision (mAP) of 76.59%. Similarly, on the HRSC2016 dataset, our method achieves a 72.4% mAP.