FGAA-FPN: Foreground-Guided Angle-Aware Feature Pyramid Network for Oriented Object Detection

TL;DR

FGAA-FPN introduces a novel multi-scale, foreground-guided, angle-aware network that significantly improves oriented object detection in aerial imagery by explicitly modeling foreground regions and orientation priors.

Contribution

It proposes FGAA-FPN, a hierarchical, multi-level network with foreground-guided modulation and angle-aware attention, enhancing feature discriminability for oriented object detection.

Findings

Achieves 75.5% mAP on DOTA v1.0

Achieves 68.3% mAP on DOTA v1.5

Outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods

Abstract

With the increasing availability of high-resolution remote sensing and aerial imagery, oriented object detection has become a key capability for geographic information updating, maritime surveillance, and disaster response. However, it remains challenging due to cluttered backgrounds, severe scale variation, and large orientation changes. Existing approaches largely improve performance through multi-scale feature fusion with feature pyramid networks or contextual modeling with attention, but they often lack explicit foreground modeling and do not leverage geometric orientation priors, which limits feature discriminability. To overcome these limitations, we propose FGAA-FPN, a Foreground-Guided Angle-Aware Feature Pyramid Network for oriented object detection. FGAA-FPN is built on a hierarchical functional decomposition that accounts for the distinct spatial resolution and semantic abstraction across pyramid levels, thereby strengthening multi-scale representations. Concretely, a Foreground-Guided Feature Modulation module learns foreground saliency under weak supervision to enhance object regions and suppress background interference in low-level features. In parallel, an Angle-Aware Multi-Head Attention module encodes relative orientation relationships to guide global interactions among high-level semantic features. Extensive experiments on DOTA v1.0 and DOTA v1.5 demonstrate that FGAA-FPN achieves state-of-the-art results, reaching 75.5% and 68.3% mAP, respectively.