MidNet: An Anchor-and-Angle-Free Detector for Oriented Ship Detection in Aerial Images

Ship detection in aerial images remains an active yet challenging task due to its arbitrary object orientation and various aspect ratios from the bird’s-eye perspective. Most existing oriented objection detection methods rely on angular prediction or predefined anchor boxes, making these methods highly sensitive to unstable angular regression and excessive hyperparameter setting. To address these issues, we replace the angular-based object encoding with an anchor-and-angle-free paradigm and propose a novel detector deploying a center and four midpoints for encoding each oriented object, namely, MidNet. Moreover, MidNet designs a novel symmetrical deformable convolution for enhancing the features of midpoints; then, the center and midpoints for an identical ship are adaptively matched by predicting corresponding centripetal shift and matching radius. Finally, a concise analytical geometry algorithm is proposed to calculate the ship orientation and refine the keypoints stepwisely for building precise oriented bounding boxes. On two public ship detection datasets, HRSC2016 and FGSD2021, MidNet outperforms the state-of-the-art detectors by achieving APs of 90.52% and 86.50%.