mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Object Detection in Aerial Images: A Large-Scale Benchmark and Challenges

arXiv 2102.12219 ↗First posted 24 Feb 2021cs.CVcited by 202

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Abstract (arXiv)

In the past decade, object detection has achieved significant progress in natural images but not in aerial images, due to the massive variations in the scale and orientation of objects caused by the bird's-eye view of aerial images. More importantly, the lack of large-scale benchmarks has become a major obstacle to the development of object detection in aerial images (ODAI). In this paper,we present a large-scale Dataset of Object deTection in Aerial images (DOTA) and comprehensive baselines for ODAI. The proposed DOTA dataset contains 1,793,658 object instances of 18 categories of oriented-bounding-box annotations collected from 11,268 aerial images. Based on this large-scale and well-annotated dataset, we build baselines covering 10 state-of-the-art algorithms with over 70 configurations, where the speed and accuracy performances of each model have been evaluated. Furthermore, we provide a code library for ODAI and build a website for evaluating different algorithms. Previous challenges run on DOTA have attracted more than 1300 teams worldwide. We believe that the expanded large-scale DOTA dataset, the extensive baselines, the code library and the challenges can facilitate the designs of robust algorithms and reproducible research on the problem of object detection in aerial images.

Key facts. Cited by 202 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 47 of its 88 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 24 Feb 2021.

Builds on

47 of 88 references.

References · 47

  1. 2014Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Contextcited by 17,498
  2. 2015Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networkscited by 9,617
  3. 2017Mask R-CNNcited by 7,259
  4. 2016Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detectioncited by 5,021
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  6. 2015Fast R-CNNcited by 2,930
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  12. 2017DOTA: A Large-scale Dataset for Object Detection in Aerial Imagescited by 622
35 more
  1. 2019Hybrid Task Cascade for Instance Segmentationcited by 479
  2. 2016AID: A Benchmark Dataset for Performance Evaluation of Aerial Scene Classificationcited by 343
  3. 2019Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images: A Survey and A New Benchmarkcited by 339
  4. 2015WIDER FACE: A Face Detection Benchmarkcited by 297
  5. 2016Speed/accuracy trade-offs for modern convolutional object detectorscited by 198
  6. 2019iSAID: A Large-scale Dataset for Instance Segmentation in Aerial Imagescited by 195
  7. 2020Align Deep Features for Oriented Object Detectioncited by 186
  8. 2017Arbitrary-Oriented Scene Text Detection via Rotation Proposalscited by 176
  9. 2017Drone-based Object Counting by Spatially Regularized Regional Proposal Networkcited by 155
  10. 2018xView: Objects in Context in Overhead Imagerycited by 145
  11. 2018Bounding Box Regression with Uncertainty for Accurate Object Detectioncited by 143
  12. 2019Gliding vertex on the horizontal bounding box for multi-oriented object detectioncited by 134
  13. 2017An Analysis of Scale Invariance in Object Detection - SNIPcited by 119
  14. 2018TextBoxes++: A Single-Shot Oriented Scene Text Detectorcited by 119
  15. 2019Towards Universal Object Detection by Domain Attentioncited by 89
  16. 2018Rotation-Sensitive Regression for Oriented Scene Text Detectioncited by 88
  17. 2016A Large Contextual Dataset for Classification, Detection and Counting of Cars with Deep Learningcited by 86
  18. 2019Clustered Object Detection in Aerial Imagescited by 83
  19. 2017Extreme clicking for efficient object annotationcited by 80
  20. 2018Vision Meets Drones: A Challengecited by 80
  21. 2020Dynamic Refinement Network for Oriented and Densely Packed Object Detectioncited by 72
  22. 2016Building a Large Scale Dataset for Image Emotion Recognition: The Fine Print and The Benchmarkcited by 71
  23. 2017Oriented Response Networkscited by 67
  24. 2020RarePlanes: Synthetic Data Takes Flightcited by 48
  25. 2018Towards Multi-class Object Detection in Unconstrained Remote Sensing Imagerycited by 46
  26. 2017Light-Head R-CNN: In Defense of Two-Stage Object Detectorcited by 30
  27. 2019SpaceNet MVOI: a Multi-View Overhead Imagery Datasetcited by 29
  28. 2020Solving Missing-Annotation Object Detection with Background Recalibration Losscited by 27
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  30. 2019Efficient Object Detection in Large Images using Deep Reinforcement Learningcited by 21
  31. 2018Real-Time Rotation-Invariant Face Detection with Progressive Calibration Networkscited by 15
  32. 2019Adaptive Period Embedding for Representing Oriented Objects in Aerial Imagescited by 14
  33. 2020FGSD: A Dataset for Fine-Grained Ship Detection in High Resolution Satellite Imagescited by 9
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  35. 2019SimpleDet: A Simple and Versatile Distributed Framework for Object Detection and Instance Recognitioncited by 3

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2021: 10; 2022: 30; 2023: 30; 2024: 47; 2025: 54; 2026: 31.

202 papers.

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  1. 2024EarthGPT: A Universal Multi-modal Large Language Model for Multi-sensor Image Comprehension in Remote Sensing Domaincited by 181
  2. 2021FAIR1M: A Benchmark Dataset for Fine-grained Object Recognition in High-Resolution Remote Sensing Imagerycited by 143
  3. 2022Towards Large-Scale Small Object Detection: Survey and Benchmarkscited by 119
  4. 2024VRSBench: A Versatile Vision-Language Benchmark Dataset for Remote Sensing Image Understandingcited by 116
  5. 2021Oriented RepPoints for Aerial Object Detectioncited by 102
  6. 2024SkySenseGPT: A Fine-Grained Instruction Tuning Dataset and Model for Remote Sensing Vision-Language Understandingcited by 101
  7. 2023The Segment Anything Model (SAM) for Remote Sensing Applications: From Zero to One Shotcited by 83
  8. 2024EarthDial: Turning Multi-sensory Earth Observations to Interactive Dialoguescited by 81
  9. 2022DynamicEarthNet: Daily Multi-Spectral Satellite Dataset for Semantic Change Segmentationcited by 78
  10. 2024HyperSIGMA: Hyperspectral Intelligence Comprehension Foundation Modelcited by 72
  11. 2024MTP: Advancing Remote Sensing Foundation Model via Multi-Task Pretrainingcited by 66
  12. 2023A Billion-scale Foundation Model for Remote Sensing Imagescited by 62
38 more
  1. 2024PANGAEA: A Global and Inclusive Benchmark for Geospatial Foundation Modelscited by 62
  2. 2022Detecting tiny objects in aerial images: A normalized Wasserstein distance and a new benchmarkcited by 56
  3. 2024Poly Kernel Inception Network for Remote Sensing Detectioncited by 52
  4. 2022RFLA: Gaussian Receptive Field based Label Assignment for Tiny Object Detectioncited by 51
  5. 2023Dynamic Coarse-to-Fine Learning for Oriented Tiny Object Detectioncited by 43
  6. 2022EarthNets: Empowering AI in Earth Observationcited by 40
  7. 2023SAMRS: Scaling-up Remote Sensing Segmentation Dataset with Segment Anything Modelcited by 38
  8. 2025When Large Vision-Language Model Meets Large Remote Sensing Imagery: Coarse-to-Fine Text-Guided Token Pruningcited by 35
  9. 20245%>100%: Breaking Performance Shackles of Full Fine-Tuning on Visual Recognition Taskscited by 34
  10. 2022Enabling Country-Scale Land Cover Mapping with Meter-Resolution Satellite Imagerycited by 31
  11. 2024STAR: A First-Ever Dataset and A Large-Scale Benchmark for Scene Graph Generation in Large-Size Satellite Imagerycited by 31
  12. 2024EarthMarker: A Visual Prompting Multi-modal Large Language Model for Remote Sensingcited by 29
  13. 2024Visible-Thermal Tiny Object Detection: A Benchmark Dataset and Baselinescited by 27
  14. 2024Cross-Modal Bidirectional Interaction Model for Referring Remote Sensing Image Segmentationcited by 26
  15. 2022Self-supervised remote sensing feature learning: Learning Paradigms, Challenges, and Future Workscited by 24
  16. 2022Aerial Monocular 3D Object Detectioncited by 23
  17. 2022AI Security for Geoscience and Remote Sensing: Challenges and Future Trendscited by 23
  18. 2021A General Gaussian Heatmap Label Assignment for Arbitrary-Oriented Object Detectioncited by 22
  19. 2023HRVQA: A Visual Question Answering Benchmark for High-Resolution Aerial Imagescited by 21
  20. 2023Remote Sensing Object Detection Meets Deep Learning: A Meta-review of Challenges and Advancescited by 20
  21. 2023SOOD: Towards Semi-Supervised Oriented Object Detectioncited by 19
  22. 2025Vision-Language Modeling Meets Remote Sensing: Models, Datasets and Perspectivescited by 18
  23. 2023Learning to Holistically Detect Bridges from Large-Size VHR Remote Sensing Imagerycited by 17
  24. 2023Multiview Aerial Visual Recognition (MAVREC): Can Multi-view Improve Aerial Visual Perception?cited by 17
  25. 2024Evaluating Tool-Augmented Agents in Remote Sensing Platformscited by 17
  26. 2023There Are No Data Like More Data- Datasets for Deep Learning in Earth Observationcited by 16
  27. 2024Video2BEV: Transforming Drone Videos to BEVs for Video-based Geo-localizationcited by 16
  28. 2025Small Object Detection: A Comprehensive Survey on Challenges, Techniques and Real-World Applicationscited by 16
  29. 2022Interactive Multi-Class Tiny-Object Detectioncited by 14
  30. 2022A Guide to Image and Video based Small Object Detection using Deep Learning : Case Study of Maritime Surveillancecited by 14
  31. 2024Popeye: A Unified Visual-Language Model for Multi-Source Ship Detection from Remote Sensing Imagerycited by 14
  32. 2024GRA: Detecting Oriented Objects through Group-wise Rotating and Attentioncited by 13
  33. 2024Size-invariance Matters: Rethinking Metrics and Losses for Imbalanced Multi-object Salient Object Detectioncited by 13
  34. 2025GeoZero: Incentivizing Reasoning from Scratch on Geospatial Scenescited by 13
  35. 2022Learning to Extract Building Footprints from Off-Nadir Aerial Imagescited by 12
  36. 2024SOOD++: Leveraging Unlabeled Data to Boost Oriented Object Detectioncited by 12
  37. 2025ATRNet-STAR: A Large Dataset and Benchmark Towards Remote Sensing Object Recognition in the Wildcited by 12
  38. 2024OpenSatMap: A Fine-grained High-resolution Satellite Dataset for Large-scale Map Constructioncited by 11

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