# Spatial Transform Decoupling for Oriented Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.10561 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10561/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [Spatial Transformer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02025/) (2015)
- [Group Equivariant Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07576/) (2016)
- [Exploring Plain Vision Transformer Backbones for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16527/) (2022)
- [EVA: Exploring the Limits of Masked Visual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.07636/) (2022)
- [DOTA: A Large-scale Dataset for Object Detection in Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10398/) (2017)
- [General E(2)-Equivariant Steerable CNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08251/) (2019)
- [Rethinking ImageNet Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08883/) (2018)
- [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)
- [ReDet: A Rotation-equivariant Detector for Aerial Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07733/) (2021)
- [RTMDet: An Empirical Study of Designing Real-Time Object Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07784/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Rethinking Rotated Object Detection with Gaussian Wasserstein Distance Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11952/) (2021)
- [HRFormer: High-Resolution Transformer for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.09408/) (2021)
- [Advancing Plain Vision Transformer Towards Remote Sensing Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03987/) (2022)
- [Gliding vertex on the horizontal bounding box for multi-oriented object detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09358/) (2019)
- [Learning High-Precision Bounding Box for Rotated Object Detection via Kullback-Leibler Divergence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01883/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [MTP: Advancing Remote Sensing Foundation Model via Multi-Task Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13430/) (2024)
- [LSKNet: A Foundation Lightweight Backbone for Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11735/) (2024)
- [Strip R-CNN: Large Strip Convolution for Remote Sensing Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03775/) (2025)
- [SOOD++: Leveraging Unlabeled Data to Boost Oriented Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01016/) (2024)
- [CC-Diff: Enhancing Contextual Coherence in Remote Sensing Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08464/) (2024)
- [Constellation Dataset: Benchmarking High-Altitude Object Detection for an Urban Intersection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16944/) (2024)
- [HA-RDet: Hybrid Anchor Rotation Detector for Oriented Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14379/) (2024)
- [Simplifying Two-Stage Detectors for On-Device Inference in Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07405/) (2024)
- [NuWa: Deriving Lightweight Class-Specific Vision Transformers for Edge Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.03118/) (2025)
- [S2Teacher: Step-by-step Teacher for Sparsely Annotated Oriented Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11111/) (2025)
- [V-CORE: Temporally Consistent Video Understanding for Video-LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.01804/) (2026)
- [Boundary and Position Information Mining for Aerial Small Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.16617/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have achieved remarkable success in computer vision tasks. However, their potential in rotation-sensitive scenarios has not been fully explored, and this limitation may be inherently attributed to the lack of spatial invariance in the data-forwarding process. In this study, we present a novel approach, termed Spatial Transform Decoupling (STD), providing a simple-yet-effective solution for oriented object detection with ViTs. Built upon stacked ViT blocks, STD utilizes separate network branches to predict the position, size, and angle of bounding boxes, effectively harnessing the spatial transform potential of ViTs in a divide-and-conquer fashion. Moreover, by aggregating cascaded activation masks (CAMs) computed upon the regressed parameters, STD gradually enhances features within regions of interest (RoIs), which complements the self-attention mechanism. Without bells and whistles, STD achieves state-of-the-art performance on the benchmark datasets including DOTA-v1.0 (82.24% mAP) and HRSC2016 (98.55% mAP), which demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method. Source code is available at https://github.com/yuhongtian17/Spatial-Transform-Decoupling.