OrientedDet

OrientedDet is a lightweight, modern PyTorch library for rotated object detection in aerial and satellite imagery. It focuses on clean geometry, reliable operators, simple datasets, and practical baseline models—without the complexity of large detection frameworks. OrientedDet is designed for researchers, practitioners, and geospatial developers who need accurate rotation-aware detectors with a minimal API.

Features

• Geometry: Rotated bounding boxes (rbox: cx, cy, w, h, angle), quadrilateral boxes (qbox), polygon ↔ rbox ↔ hbox conversions, angle normalization (le90, 0–180°), flip/rotate/scale transforms, visualization helpers
• IoU & NMS: Rotated IoU and oriented NMS (CPU with optional GPU kernels when available); AABB pre-filtering; obb_to_xyxy / HBB conversion
• Datasets: DOTA polygon loader (pattern, split file, or separate folders), image tiling, label filtering, ignore masks, oriented mAP evaluation
• Models: Oriented R-CNN (Xie et al., ICCV 2021; horizontal RPN + MidpointOffset → oriented RoIAlign + oriented ROI head), Rotated Faster R-CNN (Ren et al., NeurIPS 2015 two-stage baseline with horizontal RPN + horizontal RoIAlign + rotated ROI head; MMRotate reference), Rotated RetinaNet (Lin et al., ICCV 2017; oriented anchors, sigmoid focal loss); ResNet + FPN backbones; selective loading of external checkpoints where configs wire checkpoint.load_from_checkpoint
• Training: JSON configs + odet train, mixed precision (AMP), gradient accumulation, checkpointing, best-metric tracking, TensorBoard, optional curriculum learning and profiling

Installation

• Python >= 3.9. Use uv to install Python versions and manage the virtual environment.
• From the repo root (Linux with CUDA 12.1):

# Make sure you're in the project directory
cd ~/oriented-det

# Install uv if needed: https://docs.astral.sh/uv/getting-started/installation/
# Create a venv with Python 3.12 (uv downloads the interpreter if missing)
uv venv --python 3.12
source .venv/bin/activate

# Install PyTorch with CUDA 12.1 from PyTorch's index (2.3.0 or a higher version is fine)
uv pip install "torch>=2.3.0" "torchvision>=0.18.0" --index-url https://download.pytorch.org/whl/cu121

# Install dependencies and the project in editable mode
uv pip install -r requirements.txt
uv pip install -e .

• To auto-activate .venv when entering this repo, install the direnv shell hook and run direnv allow from the repo root. The local .envrc is intentionally gitignored so each developer can opt in on their machine.
• From PyPI: pip install oriented-det
• For development and tests: uv pip install -e ".[dev]"
• For the Gradio prediction viewer: uv pip install -e ".[viewer]" or pip install "oriented-det[viewer]"
• For macOS Apple Silicon or CPU-only, see Installation.
• Verify: pytest tests/test_geometry.py tests/test_iou.py tests/test_nms.py

Quick start

After installation:

# Train on DOTA tiles (edit dataset paths in the config first)
odet train --config configs/oriented_rcnn/dota_le90_1x.json

# Or use the Makefile wrapper (same default config)
make train

Default starter recipe: configs/oriented_rcnn/dota_le90_1x.json (see configs/oriented_rcnn/README.md). Use configs/oriented_rcnn/dota_le90_3x.json when you want the longer Oriented R-CNN schedule.

Programmatic APIs and a longer walkthrough: Getting Started. Config fields: Configuration.

Paths in documentation and configs

Examples throughout this repo use placeholder paths such as /path/to/data and /path/to/oriented-det. You can point commands and JSON configs at your real locations (e.g. dataset.data_root in a training config), or keep those placeholders and map them with symbolic links:

# Create the parent directory (may need sudo for paths under /path/to)
sudo mkdir -p /path/to

# Point the placeholder at your DOTA dataset
ln -s /home/username/dota /path/to/data

# Point the placeholder at your clone of this repo
ln -s /home/username/oriented-det /path/to/oriented-det

After that, copy-pasted commands and unmodified configs that reference /path/to/data or /path/to/oriented-det resolve to your machine. Use relative symlink targets when you want the link to stay valid if the parent directory moves.

Repository layout

What	Where	You use it for
Library	oriented_det/	Geometry, models, datasets, training engine, ops — import in Python or extend in your own code
CLI	odet (oriented_det/cli/)	Train, tile data, run val inference, metrics, demos — primary interface after uv pip install -e .
CLI implementations	tools/	Python modules that implement odet subcommands (train, preds, tiling, …). Not a separate “old” API; contributors and debugging may call python -m tools.train directly
Configs	configs/	Experiment JSON (_base_ inheritance, schema in configs/config.schema.json)
Runs	runs/<model_type>/<timestamp>/	Checkpoints, config.json snapshot, train.log (created at train time; not shipped in the repo)
Docs	docs/	MkDocs user guide and API reference
Export	export/	Optional ONNX / TensorFlow export pipeline
Examples	demo/, pretrained/	Demo images; registered checkpoints (large .pth files are usually gitignored)

odet vs tools/: Installing the package registers the odet command. It loads modules under tools/ (for example tools.train, tools.save_predictions). Shared inference and collate code lives in oriented_det/runtime/. You do not need two workflows — use odet (or make, which calls odet).

Publishing a clean tree: Ship the library, configs, docs, and tests. Omit local experiment output (runs/), datasets, and machine-specific paths in configs/Makefile.

Documentation

Full documentation is in the docs/ folder and can be built and served with MkDocs:

• Build/serve: make docs or make docs-serve (see docs/README.md); or uv pip install -e ".[docs]" then mkdocs serve.
• Guides: Getting Started, User Guide, API Reference, Examples.

Documentation by folder

Folder	README	Description
export/	export/README.md	Phase 1: PyTorch → ONNX → Keras detect bundle; cd export && make export-tf
demo/	demo/README.md	Demo images; odet image-demo or make demo with the latest runs/ checkpoint
pretrained/	pretrained/README.md	Registered checkpoints for fine-tunes; large .pth files are usually gitignored
oriented_det/cli/	oriented_det/cli/README.md	odet entry point and subcommand list
tools/	tools/README.md	CLI script implementations (invoked by odet; see Repository layout)
configs/	configs/README.md	DOTA configs and pretrain model zoo (_base_ inheritance)
deploy/example/	deploy/example/README.md	Minimal DOTA deploy smoke image
docs/	docs/README.md	MkDocs source; full user guide and API reference

Training and evaluation

Install once: uv pip install -e .. Then:

Task	Command
Train	odet train --config configs/oriented_rcnn/dota_le90_1x.json or make train
Multi-GPU	make train-multi-gpu (torchrun + cuDNN on LD_LIBRARY_PATH)
Tile DOTA	odet tile-dota /path/to/dota/train
Val predictions	odet preds --experiment-dir runs/oriented_rcnn/<timestamp> or make preds
Offline mAP	make eval-val or make preds then make metrics

DOTA configs: per-model dota_le90_1x.json / dota_le90_3x.json under configs/. Run odet --help for all subcommands. Makefile shortcuts and script-level options: tools/README.md. Config reference: docs/user-guide/configuration.md, configs/config.schema.json, configs/README.md.

Pretrained weights and evaluation

• Place exported best checkpoints under pretrained/ or use Hub slugs (odet pretrained download oriented_rcnn_dota_le90_3x or oriented_rcnn_dota_le90_1x). See pretrained/README.md and configs/README.md.
• Tiled validation: after training, run make preds then make metrics. Published mAP reports: docs/eval-reports/ (git). Raw detections for the viewer: gitignored predictions/.

Important notes

• Angles: Radians; use a single convention (e.g. le90 for DOTA). Helper: normalize_le90 from oriented_det.geometry. For angle-delta normalization in custom code, see oriented_det.models.oriented_rpn.normalize_angle_delta.
• NMS: torchvision.ops.nms_rotated does not exist; the project uses a Python-based oriented NMS with AABB pre-filtering. GPU kernels are used when available.
• ROI/memory: Training samples 512 proposals per image; use roi_chunk_size and roi_use_checkpoint for memory tuning on large GPUs.

Roadmap

See docs/roadmap.md for the full public plan. Summary:

• v0.1 (shipped): Geometry, IoU/NMS, DOTA, three ResNet-FPN detectors, config training, Hub pretrained weights
• v0.2: probiou Faster R-CNN 3× on Hub
• v0.3: Rotated FCOS (anchor-free single-stage)
• v0.4: HRSC2016 and FAIR1M dataset support
• v0.5: RTMDet-R and native YOLO-OBB (AGPL-free production tier)
• v0.6+: Swin-FPN backbone; optional fused CUDA kernels; hosted docs

Contributing

Contributions are welcome. Run tests with pytest, format with black and ruff. See docs/contributing.md for guidelines.

Publishing to PyPI

Version 0.1.1 — tag releases as v0.1.1 (git) matching version in pyproject.toml.

Configs: edit configs/ at the repo root, then make sync-configs so oriented_det/configs/ stays in sync (see oriented_det/configs/vendored_manifest.txt). CI runs make check-configs.

Install publishing tools (included in .[dev]):

uv pip install -e ".[dev]"   # or: make publish-deps

Step-by-step: first release (v0.1.0)

1. One-time PyPI setup

1. Create accounts on test.pypi.org and pypi.org (can use the same email).
2. Register the project name oriented-det on PyPI (first upload creates it; TestPyPI is separate).
3. Trusted Publishing (recommended) — on each index, add a publisher for DL4EO/oriented-det, workflow publish.yml, environments testpypi / pypi. See .github/workflows/README.md.
4. Or API tokens — create pypi-… tokens and export locally (or add GitHub secrets TESTPYPI_API_TOKEN, PYPI_API_TOKEN):

export TWINE_USERNAME=__token__
export TWINE_PASSWORD=pypi-AgEI…   # TestPyPI or PyPI token

2. Pre-release checklist

make check-configs
pytest tests/ -q

Bump version in pyproject.toml and docs/changelog.md if needed (currently 0.1.0).

3. Build locally

make sync-configs   # after changing configs/ or the manifest
make build          # check-configs + sdist + wheel into dist/
make twine-check

Smoke-test the wheel:

python -m venv /tmp/odet-smoke && source /tmp/odet-smoke/bin/activate
pip install torch torchvision --index-url https://download.pytorch.org/whl/cpu
pip install dist/*.whl
odet --help
python -c "from oriented_det.geometry import RBox; print(RBox(0,0,1,1,0).area)"

4. Upload to TestPyPI

make publish-testpypi

Install from TestPyPI (PyPI index still needed for dependencies like torch):

pip install --index-url https://test.pypi.org/simple/ --extra-index-url https://pypi.org/simple oriented-det==0.1.0
odet --help

Or trigger Actions → Publish → Run workflow (target: testpypi) after configuring Trusted Publishing or secrets.

5. Tag and upload to production PyPI

When TestPyPI looks good:

git tag -a v0.1.0 -m "Release 0.1.0"
git push origin v0.1.0          # triggers publish.yml → PyPI (if CI is configured)

Local upload (fallback):

make publish-pypi

Create a GitHub Release from tag v0.1.0 with notes from docs/changelog.md.

6. After publish

• Verify pip install oriented-det in a clean environment.
• Users still install PyTorch separately for their CUDA/CPU platform.

Makefile targets

Target	Action
make publish-deps	Install build and twine
make build	check-configs + python -m build
make twine-check	Validate dist/* metadata
make publish-testpypi	Build, check, upload to TestPyPI
make publish-pypi	Build, check, upload to PyPI

Notes:

• Trusted Publishing avoids long-lived tokens; keep make publish-* for manual releases. Details: .github/workflows/README.md.

License

Apache-2.0 — Copyright © Jeff Faudi and DL4EO. See LICENSE for details.

Acknowledgements

Design and APIs are informed by MMRotate, MMDetection, Detectron2, and related work in oriented object detection; pretrained checkpoints in pretrained/ are OrientedDet exports from this codebase, not MMRotate zoo bundles.