# Arbitrary-Oriented Ship Detection through Center-Head Point Extraction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.11189 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11189/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 69 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Jan 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01355/) (2019)
- [YOLO9000: Better, Faster, Stronger](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08242/) (2016)
- [Cascade R-CNN: Delving into High Quality Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00726/) (2017)
- [Objects as Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07850/) (2019)
- [Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08050/) (2016)
- [Stacked Hourglass Networks for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06937/) (2016)
- [CornerNet: Detecting Objects as Paired Keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.01244/) (2018)
- [DOTA: A Large-scale Dataset for Object Detection in Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10398/) (2017)
- [Hybrid Task Cascade for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07518/) (2019)
- [Deep Layer Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06484/) (2017)
- [R-FCN: Object Detection via Region-based Fully Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.06409/) (2016)
- [Deep Learning for Generic Object Detection: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02165/) (2018)
- [Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images: A Survey and A New Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00133/) (2019)
- [R3Det: Refined Single-Stage Detector with Feature Refinement for Rotating Object](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05612/) (2019)
- [Align Deep Features for Oriented Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09397/) (2020)
- [Arbitrary-Oriented Scene Text Detection via Rotation Proposals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01086/) (2017)
- [Gliding vertex on the horizontal bounding box for multi-oriented object detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09358/) (2019)
- [Dense Label Encoding for Boundary Discontinuity Free Rotation Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.09670/) (2020)
- [A Survey on Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06201/) (2016)
- [Learning Modulated Loss for Rotated Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08299/) (2019)
- [Dynamic Anchor Learning for Arbitrary-Oriented Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.04150/) (2020)
- [Oriented Response Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.01833/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Dense Nested Attention Network for Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00487/) (2021)
- [An Empirical Study of Remote Sensing Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02825/) (2022)
- [Remote Sensing Object Detection Meets Deep Learning: A Meta-review of Challenges and Advances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06751/) (2023)
- [Infrared Small Target Detection in Satellite Videos: A New Dataset and A Novel Recurrent Feature Refinement Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12448/) (2024)
- [Oriented object detection in optical remote sensing images using deep learning: a survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10473/) (2023)
- [DARDet: A Dense Anchor-free Rotated Object Detector in Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.01025/) (2021)
- [Beyond Open Vocabulary: Multimodal Prompting for Object Detection in Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.01954/) (2026)
- [MidNet: An Anchor-and-Angle-Free Detector for Oriented Ship Detection in Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.10961/) (2021)
- [Enhancing Rotated Object Detection via Anisotropic Gaussian Bounding Box and Bhattacharyya Distance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16445/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Ship detection in remote sensing images plays a crucial role in various applications and has drawn increasing attention in recent years. However, existing arbitrary-oriented ship detection methods are generally developed on a set of predefined rotated anchor boxes. These predefined boxes not only lead to inaccurate angle predictions but also introduce extra hyper-parameters and high computational cost. Moreover, the prior knowledge of ship size has not been fully exploited by existing methods, which hinders the improvement of their detection accuracy. Aiming at solving the above issues, in this paper, we propose a center-head point extraction based detector (named CHPDet) to achieve arbitrary-oriented ship detection in remote sensing images. Our CHPDet formulates arbitrary-oriented ships as rotated boxes with head points which are used to determine the direction. And rotated Gaussian kernel is used to map the annotations into target heatmaps. Keypoint estimation is performed to find the center of ships. Then, the size and head point of the ships are regressed. The orientation-invariant model (OIM) is also used to produce orientation-invariant feature maps. Finally, we use the target size as prior to finetune the results. Moreover, we introduce a new dataset for multi-class arbitrary-oriented ship detection in remote sensing images at a fixed ground sample distance (GSD) which is named FGSD2021. Experimental results on FGSD2021 and two other widely used data sets, i.e., HRSC2016, and UCAS-AOD demonstrate that our CHPDet achieves state-of-the-art performance and can well distinguish between bow and stern. Code and FGSD2021 dataset are available at https://github.com/zf020114/CHPDet.