March 2026

Conference Paper

Interactive Rotated Object Detection for Novel Class Detection in Remotely Sensed Imagery

By:
Burges, Marvin S; Ambrozio Dias, Philipe ; Lunga, Wadzanai D; Woody, Carson B; Walters, Sarah E
Page Number:
1219-1227
Book Title:
IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV 2025)
Publication Date:
March 12, 2026
Conference Name:
Computer Vision for Earth Observation Workshop at IEEE WACV 2025
Conference Location:
Tucson, Arizona, United States of America
Conference Sponsor:
IEEE

Abstract

In this paper we propose IRTR-DETR an Interactive and Real-Time Rotated DEtection TRansformer that extends IRTDETR to predict rotated bounding boxes. IRTR-DETR maintains the Human-In-The-Loop (HIL) workflow of IRTDETR but introduces rotation-aware heads for improved detection of objects with arbitrary orientations. Similarly to IRTDETR IRTR-DETR can be trained with a small labeled sample set in an interactive setting but we show that it can also be pretrained on related but not identical data--such as a building damage dataset--before being applied to tasks like identifying buildings under construction. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach on the publicly available Tiny-DOTA and xBD dataset as well as two study-cases on proprietary datasets of greenhouses and houses under construction ("waffle homes"). Detecting greenhouses is highly relevant in the context of damage assessment while "waffle homes" aid understanding typical floorplans and building codes in different areas both thereby supporting population modeling emergency response and policy planning. Our method outperforms the state of the art in interactive rotated object detection on the Tiny-DOTA dataset by 5.7 percent and improves upon the non interactive RTDETR by 7.85 to 19.39 percent (depending on the number of provided samples) while maintaining its real-time efficiency.