Partial Weakly-Supervised Oriented Object Detection

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel Partial Weakly-Supervised Oriented Object Detection framework that leverages partially weak annotations to efficiently detect oriented objects with reduced annotation costs and improved performance.

Contribution

It presents the first framework for partial weak supervision in oriented object detection, including a new OS-Student model and CPF strategy, outperforming existing weakly supervised methods.

Findings

Outperforms weakly supervised algorithms with partial annotations

Achieves comparable or better results than semi-supervised methods

Demonstrates effectiveness on multiple large-scale datasets

Abstract

The growing demand for oriented object detection (OOD) across various domains has driven significant research in this area. However, the high cost of dataset annotation remains a major concern. Current mainstream OOD algorithms can be mainly categorized into three types: (1) fully supervised methods using complete oriented bounding box (OBB) annotations, (2) semi-supervised methods using partial OBB annotations, and (3) weakly supervised methods using weak annotations such as horizontal boxes or points. However, these algorithms inevitably increase the cost of models in terms of annotation speed or annotation cost. To address this issue, we propose: (1) the first Partial Weakly-Supervised Oriented Object Detection (PWOOD) framework based on partially weak annotations (horizontal boxes or single points), which can efficiently leverage large amounts of unlabeled data, significantly outperforming weakly supervised algorithms trained with partially weak annotations, also offers a lower cost solution; (2) Orientation-and-Scale-aware Student (OS-Student) model capable of learning orientation and scale information with only a small amount of orientation-agnostic or scale-agnostic weak annotations; and (3) Class-Agnostic Pseudo-Label Filtering strategy (CPF) to reduce the model's sensitivity to static filtering thresholds. Comprehensive experiments on DOTA-v1.0/v1.5/v2.0 and DIOR datasets demonstrate that our PWOOD framework performs comparably to, or even surpasses traditional semi-supervised algorithms. Our code will be made publicly available.