Detection and localization of multi-scale and oriented objects using an enhanced feature refinement algorithm

Object detection is a fundamental aspect of computer vision, with numerous generic object detectors proposed by various researchers. The proposed work presents a novel single-stage rotation detector that can detect oriented and multi-scale objects accurately from diverse scenarios. This detector addresses the challenges faced by current rotation detectors, such as the detection of arbitrary orientations, objects that are densely arranged, and the issue of loss discontinuity. First, the detector also adopts a progressive regression form (coarse-to-fine-grained approach) that uses both horizontal anchors (speed and higher recall) and rotating anchors (oriented objects) in cluttered backgrounds. Second, the proposed detector includes a feature refinement module that helps minimize the problems related to feature angulation and reduces the number of bounding boxes generated. Finally, to address the issue of loss discontinuity, the proposed detector utilizes a newly formulated adjustable loss function that can be extended to both single-stage and two-stage detectors. The proposed detector shows outstanding performance on benchmark datasets and significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in terms of speed and accuracy.