PointOBB: Learning Oriented Object Detection via Single Point Supervision
Authors: Junwei Luo, Xue Yang, Yi Yu, Qingyun Li, Junchi Yan, Yansheng Li

Single point-supervised object detection is gaining attention due to its cost-effectiveness. However existing approaches focus on generating horizontal bounding boxes (HBBs) while ignoring oriented bounding boxes (OBBs) commonly used for objects in aerial images. This paper proposes PointOBB the first single Point-based OBB generation method for oriented object detection. PointOBB operates through the collaborative utilization of three distinctive views: an original view a resized view and a rotated/flipped (rot/flp) view. Upon the original view we leverage the resized and rot/flp views to build a scale augmentation module and an angle acquisition module respectively. In the former module a Scale-Sensitive Consistency (SSC) loss is designed to enhance the deep network's ability to perceive the object scale. For accurate object angle predictions the latter module incorporates self-supervised learning to predict angles which is associated with a scale-guided Dense-to-Sparse (DS) matching strategy for aggregating dense angles corresponding to sparse objects. The resized and rot/flp views are switched using a progressive multi-view switching strategy during training to achieve coupled optimization of scale and angle. Experimental results on the DIOR-R and DOTA-v1.0 datasets demonstrate that PointOBB achieves promising performance and significantly outperforms potential point-supervised baselines.