  Object detection is an important and challenging problem in computer vision.
Although the past decade has witnessed major advances in object detection in
natural scenes, such successes have been slow to aerial imagery, not only
because of the huge variation in the scale, orientation and shape of the object
instances on the earth's surface, but also due to the scarcity of
well-annotated datasets of objects in aerial scenes. To advance object
detection research in Earth Vision, also known as Earth Observation and Remote
Sensing, we introduce a large-scale Dataset for Object deTection in Aerial
images (DOTA). To this end, we collect $2806$ aerial images from different
sensors and platforms. Each image is of the size about 4000-by-4000 pixels and
contains objects exhibiting a wide variety of scales, orientations, and shapes.
These DOTA images are then annotated by experts in aerial image interpretation
using $15$ common object categories. The fully annotated DOTA images contains
$188,282$ instances, each of which is labeled by an arbitrary (8 d.o.f.)
quadrilateral To build a baseline for object detection in Earth Vision, we
evaluate state-of-the-art object detection algorithms on DOTA. Experiments
demonstrate that DOTA well represents real Earth Vision applications and are
quite challenging.
