Rethinking Boundary Discontinuity Problem for Oriented Object Detection

Oriented object detection has been developed rapidly in the past few years, where rotation equivariant is crucial for detectors to predict rotated bounding boxes. It is expected that the prediction can maintain the corresponding rotation when objects rotate, but severe mutational in angular prediction is sometimes observed when objects rotate near the boundary angle, which is well-known boundary discontinuity problem. The problem has been long believed to be caused by the sharp loss increase at the angular boundary during training, and widely used IoU-like loss generally deal with this problem by loss-smoothing. However, we experimentally find that even state-of-the-art IoU-like methods do not actually solve the problem. On further analysis, we find the essential cause of the problem lies at discontinuous angular ground-truth(box), not just discontinuous loss. There always exists an irreparable gap between continuous model ouput and discontinuous angular ground-truth, so angular prediction near the breakpoints becomes highly unstable, which cannot be eliminated just by loss-smoothing in IoU-like methods. To thoroughly solve this problem, we propose a simple and effective Angle Correct Module (ACM) based on polar coordinate decomposition. ACM can be easily plugged into the workflow of oriented object detectors to repair angular prediction. It converts the smooth value of the model output into sawtooth angular value, and then IoU-like loss can fully release their potential. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets show that whether Gaussian-based or SkewIoU methods are improved to the same performance of AP50 and AP75 with the enhancement of ACM.