# RiO-DETR: DETR for Real-time Oriented Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09411 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.09411/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 53 of its 67 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Mar 2026.

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

- [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)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01355/) (2019)
- [DINO: DETR with Improved DeNoising Anchor Boxes for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03605/) (2022)
- [YOLOX: Exceeding YOLO Series in 2021](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08430/) (2021)
- [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)
- [DETRs Beat YOLOs on Real-time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08069/) (2023)
- [Object Detection in 20 Years: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05055/) (2019)
- [DN-DETR: Accelerate DETR Training by Introducing Query DeNoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01305/) (2022)
- [YOLOv11: An Overview of the Key Architectural Enhancements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17725/) (2024)
- [Conditional DETR for Fast Training Convergence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06152/) (2021)
- [YOLOv12: Attention-Centric Real-Time Object Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12524/) (2025)
- [Oriented R-CNN for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05699/) (2021)
- [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)
- [RTMDet: An Empirical Study of Designing Real-Time Object Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07784/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Advancing Plain Vision Transformer Towards Remote Sensing Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03987/) (2022)
- [FAIR1M: A Benchmark Dataset for Fine-grained Object Recognition in High-Resolution Remote Sensing Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05569/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Anchor-free Oriented Proposal Generator for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.01931/) (2021)
- [Oriented RepPoints for Aerial Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11111/) (2021)
- [RT-DETRv2: Improved Baseline with Bag-of-Freebies for Real-Time Detection Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.17140/) (2024)
- [YOLO26: Key Architectural Enhancements and Performance Benchmarking for Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25164/) (2025)

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

- [GTR: Gated Token Recurrence for Efficient Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.26590/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present RiO-DETR: DETR for Real-time Oriented Object Detection, the first real-time oriented detection transformer to the best of our knowledge. Adapting DETR to oriented bounding boxes (OBBs) poses three challenges: semantics-dependent orientation, angle periodicity that breaks standard Euclidean refinement, and an enlarged search space that slows convergence. RiO-DETR resolves these issues with task-native designs while preserving real-time efficiency. First, we propose Content-Driven Angle Estimation by decoupling angle from positional queries, together with Rotation-Rectified Orthogonal Attention to capture complementary cues for reliable orientation. Second, Decoupled Periodic Refinement combines bounded coarse-to-fine updates with a Shortest-Path Periodic Loss for stable learning across angular seams. Third, Oriented Dense O2O injects angular diversity into dense supervision to speed up angle convergence at no extra cost. Extensive experiments on DOTA-1.0, DIOR-R, and FAIR-1M-2.0 demonstrate RiO-DETR establishes a new speed--accuracy trade-off for real-time oriented detection. GitHub Repository: https://github.com/RicePasteM/RiO-DETR.