# DPPD: Deformable Polar Polygon Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.02250 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02250/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [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)
- [YOLOv4: Optimal Speed and Accuracy of Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10934/) (2020)
- [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)
- [BEVFormer: Learning Bird's-Eye-View Representation from Multi-Camera Images via Spatiotemporal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.17270/) (2022)
- [Objects as Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07850/) (2019)
- [CenterNet: Keypoint Triplets for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08189/) (2019)
- [YOLACT: Real-time Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02689/) (2019)
- [Conditional Convolutions for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.05664/) (2020)
- [PolarMask: Single Shot Instance Segmentation with Polar Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13226/) (2019)
- [Bottom-up Object Detection by Grouping Extreme and Center Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08043/) (2019)
- [BlendMask: Top-Down Meets Bottom-Up for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.00309/) (2020)
- [RangeDet:In Defense of Range View for LiDAR-based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10039/) (2021)
- [Deep Set Prediction Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06565/) (2019)
- [Explicit Shape Encoding for Real-Time Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04067/) (2019)
- [YOLO-LITE: A Real-Time Object Detection Algorithm Optimized for Non-GPU Computers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.05588/) (2018)
- [CenterMask: single shot instance segmentation with point representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04446/) (2020)
- [Poly-YOLO: higher speed, more precise detection and instance segmentation for YOLOv3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.13243/) (2020)
- [Learn to Predict Sets Using Feed-Forward Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.11845/) (2020)
- [FourierNet: Compact mask representation for instance segmentation using differentiable shape decoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.02709/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [PCFootprint: A Large-Scale Dataset and Benchmark for Vectorized Building Footprint Extraction from Aerial LiDAR Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.20455/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Regular object detection methods output rectangle bounding boxes, which are unable to accurately describe the actual object shapes. Instance segmentation methods output pixel-level labels, which are computationally expensive for real-time applications. Therefore, a polygon representation is needed to achieve precise shape alignment, while retaining low computation cost. We develop a novel Deformable Polar Polygon Object Detection method (DPPD) to detect objects in polygon shapes. In particular, our network predicts, for each object, a sparse set of flexible vertices to construct the polygon, where each vertex is represented by a pair of angle and distance in the Polar coordinate system. To enable training, both ground truth and predicted polygons are densely resampled to have the same number of vertices with equal-spaced raypoints. The resampling operation is fully differentable, allowing gradient back-propagation. Sparse polygon predicton ensures high-speed runtime inference while dense resampling allows the network to learn object shapes with high precision. The polygon detection head is established on top of an anchor-free and NMS-free network architecture. DPPD has been demonstrated successfully in various object detection tasks for autonomous driving such as traffic-sign, crosswalk, vehicle and pedestrian objects.