# Dynamic Coarse-to-Fine Learning for Oriented Tiny Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.08876 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08876/

## Key facts

- Cited by 43 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 59 of its 79 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 59)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01355/) (2019)
- [Deformable Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06211/) (2017)
- [MMDetection: Open MMLab Detection Toolbox and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07155/) (2019)
- [Cascade R-CNN: Delving into High Quality Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00726/) (2017)
- [EfficientDet: Scalable and Efficient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09070/) (2019)
- [Path Aggregation Network for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01534/) (2018)
- [DOTA: A Large-scale Dataset for Object Detection in Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10398/) (2017)
- [DAB-DETR: Dynamic Anchor Boxes are Better Queries for DETR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12329/) (2022)
- [Bridging the Gap Between Anchor-based and Anchor-free Detection via Adaptive Training Sample Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02424/) (2019)
- [Sparse R-CNN: End-to-End Object Detection with Learnable Proposals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12450/) (2020)
- [Hybrid Task Cascade for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07518/) (2019)
- [Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images: A Survey and A New Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00133/) (2019)
- [Relation Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11575/) (2017)
- [RepPoints: Point Set Representation for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.11490/) (2019)
- [Oriented R-CNN for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05699/) (2021)
- [DetectoRS: Detecting Objects with Recursive Feature Pyramid and Switchable Atrous Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.02334/) (2020)
- [UnitBox: An Advanced Object Detection Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.01471/) (2016)
- [Object Detection in Aerial Images: A Large-Scale Benchmark and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12219/) (2021)
- [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)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [MTP: Advancing Remote Sensing Foundation Model via Multi-Task Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13430/) (2024)
- [Poly Kernel Inception Network for Remote Sensing Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06258/) (2024)
- [STAR: A First-Ever Dataset and A Large-Scale Benchmark for Scene Graph Generation in Large-Size Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09410/) (2024)
- [Target before Shooting: Accurate Anomaly Detection and Localization under One Millisecond via Cascade Patch Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06748/) (2023)
- [UAV-DETR: Efficient End-to-End Object Detection for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01855/) (2025)
- [Strip R-CNN: Large Strip Convolution for Remote Sensing Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03775/) (2025)
- [GRA: Detecting Oriented Objects through Group-wise Rotating and Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11127/) (2024)
- [SOOD++: Leveraging Unlabeled Data to Boost Oriented Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01016/) (2024)
- [CYCLO: Cyclic Graph Transformer Approach to Multi-Object Relationship Modeling in Aerial Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01029/) (2024)
- [Multi-clue Consistency Learning to Bridge Gaps Between General and Oriented Object in Semi-supervised Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05909/) (2024)
- [OrientedFormer: An End-to-End Transformer-Based Oriented Object Detector in Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19648/) (2024)
- [Hausdorff Distance Matching with Adaptive Query Denoising for Rotated Detection Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07598/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Pretraining for Domain-Specific Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17562/) (2025)
- [LEGNet: A Lightweight Edge-Gaussian Network for Low-Quality Remote Sensing Image Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14012/) (2025)
- [Real, Fake, or Manipulated? Detecting Machine-Influenced Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.15350/) (2025)
- [A Satellite Imagery Dataset for Long-Term Sustainable Development in United States Cities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00465/) (2023)
- [More Clear, More Flexible, More Precise: A Comprehensive Oriented Object Detection benchmark for UAV](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.20032/) (2025)
- [Measuring the Impact of Rotation Equivariance on Aerial Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09896/) (2025)
- [Oriented Tiny Object Detection: A Dataset, Benchmark, and Dynamic Unbiased Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11582/) (2024)
- [SO-DETR: Leveraging Dual-Domain Features and Knowledge Distillation for Small Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11470/) (2025)
- [Real-Time Oriented Object Detection Transformer in Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15497/) (2026)
- [Dynamic Loss Decay based Robust Oriented Object Detection on Remote Sensing Images with Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09024/) (2024)
- [High-Frequency Semantics and Geometric Priors for End-to-End Detection Transformers in Challenging UAV Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.00825/) (2025)
- [RiO-DETR: DETR for Real-time Oriented Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.09411/) (2026)
- [Global Context or Local Detail? Adaptive Visual Grounding for Hallucination Mitigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.24396/) (2026)
- [SLIP-RS: Structured-Attribute Language-Image Pre-Training for Remote Sensing Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.23144/) (2026)
- [Rethinking Scale Imbalance in Semi-supervised Object Detection for Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14718/) (2023)
- [GOOD: Towards Domain Generalized Orientated Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12765/) (2024)
- [Category-Aware Dynamic Label Assignment with High-Quality Oriented Proposal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03205/) (2024)
- [Investigating Long-term Training for Remote Sensing Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15143/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Detecting arbitrarily oriented tiny objects poses intense challenges to existing detectors, especially for label assignment. Despite the exploration of adaptive label assignment in recent oriented object detectors, the extreme geometry shape and limited feature of oriented tiny objects still induce severe mismatch and imbalance issues. Specifically, the position prior, positive sample feature, and instance are mismatched, and the learning of extreme-shaped objects is biased and unbalanced due to little proper feature supervision. To tackle these issues, we propose a dynamic prior along with the coarse-to-fine assigner, dubbed DCFL. For one thing, we model the prior, label assignment, and object representation all in a dynamic manner to alleviate the mismatch issue. For another, we leverage the coarse prior matching and finer posterior constraint to dynamically assign labels, providing appropriate and relatively balanced supervision for diverse instances. Extensive experiments on six datasets show substantial improvements to the baseline. Notably, we obtain the state-of-the-art performance for one-stage detectors on the DOTA-v1.5, DOTA-v2.0, and DIOR-R datasets under single-scale training and testing. Codes are available at https://github.com/Chasel-Tsui/mmrotate-dcfl.