Oriented Vehicle Detection in Aerial Images Based on YOLOv4

CNN-based object detectors have achieved great success in recent years. The available detectors adopted horizontal bounding boxes to locate various objects. However, in some unique scenarios, objects such as buildings and vehicles in aerial images may be densely arranged and have apparent orientations. Therefore, some approaches extend the horizontal bounding box to the oriented bounding box to better extract objects, usually carried out by directly regressing the angle or corners. However, this suffers from the discontinuous boundary problem caused by angular periodicity or corner order. In this paper, we propose a simple but efficient oriented object detector based on YOLOv4 architecture. We regress the offset of an object’s front point instead of its angle or corners to avoid the above mentioned problems. In addition, we introduce the intersection over union (IoU) correction factor to make the training process more stable. The experimental results on two public datasets, DOTA and HRSC2016, demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms other methods in terms of detection speed while maintaining high accuracy. In DOTA, our proposed method achieved the highest mAP for the classes with prominent front-side appearances, such as small vehicles, large vehicles, and ships. The highly efficient architecture of YOLOv4 increases more than 25% detection speed compared to the other approaches.