# Learning Remote Sensing Object Detection with Single Point Supervision

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.14141 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14141/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 53 of its 100 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 53)

- [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)
- [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)
- [Knowledge Distillation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05525/) (2020)
- [FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01355/) (2019)
- [MMDetection: Open MMLab Detection Toolbox and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07155/) (2019)
- [DOTA: A Large-scale Dataset for Object Detection in Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10398/) (2017)
- [DN-DETR: Accelerate DETR Training by Introducing Query DeNoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01305/) (2022)
- [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)
- [What's the Point: Semantic Segmentation with Point Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02106/) (2015)
- [Oriented R-CNN for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05699/) (2021)
- [ReDet: A Rotation-equivariant Detector for Aerial Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07733/) (2021)
- [iSAID: A Large-scale Dataset for Instance Segmentation in Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12886/) (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)
- [Weakly Supervised Deep Detection Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02853/) (2015)
- [Arbitrary-Oriented Scene Text Detection via Rotation Proposals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01086/) (2017)
- [Adversarial Complementary Learning for Weakly Supervised Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06962/) (2018)
- [Rethinking Rotated Object Detection with Gaussian Wasserstein Distance Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11952/) (2021)
- [Rethinking Counting and Localization in Crowds:A Purely Point-Based Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12746/) (2021)
- [BoxInst: High-Performance Instance Segmentation with Box Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02310/) (2020)
- [Advancing Plain Vision Transformer Towards Remote Sensing Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03987/) (2022)
- [Multiple Instance Detection Network with Online Instance Classifier Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00138/) (2017)
- [PCL: Proposal Cluster Learning for Weakly Supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03342/) (2018)
- [Clustered Object Detection in Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08008/) (2019)
- [Pointly-Supervised Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06404/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [EarthMarker: A Visual Prompting Multi-modal Large Language Model for Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13596/) (2024)
- [PointOBB: Learning Oriented Object Detection via Single Point Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.14757/) (2023)
- [PointOBB-v3: Expanding Performance Boundaries of Single Point-Supervised Oriented Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13898/) (2025)
- [Partial Weakly-Supervised Oriented Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02751/) (2025)
- [Sparse Generation: Making Pseudo Labels Sparse for Point Weakly Supervised Object Detection on Low Data Volume](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19306/) (2024)
- [ABBSPO: Adaptive Bounding Box Scaling and Symmetric Prior based Orientation Prediction for Detecting Aerial Image Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10031/) (2025)
- [SPWOOD: Sparse Partial Weakly-Supervised Oriented Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03634/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Pointly Supervised Object Detection (PSOD) has attracted considerable interests due to its lower labeling cost as compared to box-level supervised object detection. However, the complex scenes, densely packed and dynamic-scale objects in Remote Sensing (RS) images hinder the development of PSOD methods in RS field. In this paper, we make the first attempt to achieve RS object detection with single point supervision, and propose a PSOD method tailored for RS images. Specifically, we design a point label upgrader (PLUG) to generate pseudo box labels from single point labels, and then use the pseudo boxes to supervise the optimization of existing detectors. Moreover, to handle the challenge of the densely packed objects in RS images, we propose a sparse feature guided semantic prediction module which can generate high-quality semantic maps by fully exploiting informative cues from sparse objects. Extensive ablation studies on the DOTA dataset have validated the effectiveness of our method. Our method can achieve significantly better performance as compared to state-of-the-art image-level and point-level supervised detection methods, and reduce the performance gap between PSOD and box-level supervised object detection. Code is available at https://github.com/heshitian/PLUG.