# Edge Wasserstein Distance Loss for Oriented Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.07048 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07048/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Dec 2023.

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

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01355/) (2019)
- [Generalized Intersection over Union: A Metric and A Loss for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09630/) (2019)
- [DOTA: A Large-scale Dataset for Object Detection in Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10398/) (2017)
- [Distance-IoU Loss: Faster and Better Learning for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08287/) (2019)
- [EAST: An Efficient and Accurate Scene Text Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03155/) (2017)
- [Oriented R-CNN for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05699/) (2021)
- [Real-time Scene Text Detection with Differentiable Binarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08947/) (2019)
- [UnitBox: An Advanced Object Detection Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.01471/) (2016)
- [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)
- [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)
- [MMRotate: A Rotated Object Detection Benchmark using PyTorch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13317/) (2022)
- [TextSnake: A Flexible Representation for Detecting Text of Arbitrary Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.01544/) (2018)
- [Dense Label Encoding for Boundary Discontinuity Free Rotation Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.09670/) (2020)
- [Learning Modulated Loss for Rotated Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08299/) (2019)
- [PIoU Loss: Towards Accurate Oriented Object Detection in Complex Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09584/) (2020)
- [R2CNN: Rotational Region CNN for Orientation Robust Scene Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.09579/) (2017)
- [PolarMask++: Enhanced Polar Representation for Single-Shot Instance Segmentation and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02184/) (2021)
- [Learning a Rotation Invariant Detector with Rotatable Bounding Box](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09405/) (2017)
- [RSDet++: Point-based Modulated Loss for More Accurate Rotated Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.11906/) (2021)
- [Real-Time Rotation-Invariant Face Detection with Progressive Calibration Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06039/) (2018)
- [Position Detection and Direction Prediction for Arbitrary-Oriented Ships via Multitask Rotation Region Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.04828/) (2018)
- [AlphaRotate: A Rotation Detection Benchmark using TensorFlow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06677/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Regression loss design is an essential topic for oriented object detection. Due to the periodicity of the angle and the ambiguity of width and height definition, traditional L1-distance loss and its variants have been suffered from the metric discontinuity and the square-like problem. As a solution, the distribution based methods show significant advantages by representing oriented boxes as distributions. Differing from exploited the Gaussian distribution to get analytical form of distance measure, we propose a novel oriented regression loss, Wasserstein Distance(EWD) loss, to alleviate the square-like problem. Specifically, for the oriented box(OBox) representation, we choose a specially-designed distribution whose probability density function is only nonzero over the edges. On this basis, we develop Wasserstein distance as the measure. Besides, based on the edge representation of OBox, the EWD loss can be generalized to quadrilateral and polynomial regression scenarios. Experiments on multiple popular datasets and different detectors show the effectiveness of the proposed method.