# DAFNe: A One-Stage Anchor-Free Approach for Oriented Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.06148 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06148/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 44 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Sep 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [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)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [Rethinking Atrous Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05587/) (2017)
- [FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01355/) (2019)
- [Accurate, Large Minibatch SGD: Training ImageNet in 1 Hour](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02677/) (2017)
- [YOLO9000: Better, Faster, Stronger](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08242/) (2016)
- [Show, Attend and Tell: Neural Image Caption Generation with Visual Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03044/) (2015)
- [Deep Visual-Semantic Alignments for Generating Image Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.2306/) (2014)
- [CornerNet: Detecting Objects as Paired Keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.01244/) (2018)
- [CenterNet: Keypoint Triplets for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08189/) (2019)
- [DOTA: A Large-scale Dataset for Object Detection in Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10398/) (2017)
- [Oriented R-CNN for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05699/) (2021)
- [UnitBox: An Advanced Object Detection Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.01471/) (2016)
- [ReDet: A Rotation-equivariant Detector for Aerial Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07733/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Simultaneous Detection and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1407.1808/) (2014)
- [Bottom-up Object Detection by Grouping Extreme and Center Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08043/) (2019)
- [Learning High-Precision Bounding Box for Rotated Object Detection via Kullback-Leibler Divergence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01883/) (2021)
- [Hypercolumns for Object Segmentation and Fine-grained Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5752/) (2014)
- [Instance-aware Semantic Segmentation via Multi-task Network Cascades](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04412/) (2015)
- [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, 4 of 4)

- [AO2-DETR: Arbitrary-Oriented Object Detection Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12785/) (2022)
- [GauCho: Gaussian Distributions with Cholesky Decomposition for Oriented Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01565/) (2025)
- [MKSNet: Advanced Small Object Detection in Remote Sensing Imagery with Multi-Kernel and Dual Attention Mechanisms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.03640/) (2025)
- [LOGOS: Language-guided Oriented Object Detection in Aerial Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.08004/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present DAFNe, a Dense one-stage Anchor-Free deep Network for oriented object detection. As a one-stage model, it performs bounding box predictions on a dense grid over the input image, being architecturally simpler in design, as well as easier to optimize than its two-stage counterparts. Furthermore, as an anchor-free model, it reduces the prediction complexity by refraining from employing bounding box anchors. With DAFNe we introduce an orientation-aware generalization of the center-ness function for arbitrarily oriented bounding boxes to down-weight low-quality predictions and a center-to-corner bounding box prediction strategy that improves object localization performance. Our experiments show that DAFNe outperforms all previous one-stage anchor-free models on DOTA 1.0, DOTA 1.5, and UCAS-AOD and is on par with the best models on HRSC2016.