Deep-Guided Dual-Task Collaborative Learning for Oriented Object Detection in Remote Sensing Images

Object detection, as a fundamental task, forms the cornerstone of intelligent applications in both UAV surveillance and satellite remote sensing. While most prior works concentrate on solving object scale and rotation angle variance caused by altitude changes, the spatial misalignment stemming from the differing demands of classification subtask and regression subtask also plays a critical role. To tackle these problems, a novel deep-guided dual-task collaborative learning framework is proposed. This framework integrates two key modules: deep-guided collaborative feature fusion (DGC-FF) and dual-task collaborative feature alignment (DTC-FA). DGC-FF effectively integrates fine-grained spatial and semantic information to enhance the network’s multi-scale perception capability. DTC-FA alleviates spatial misalignment between classification and regression branches through collaborative feature alignment and incorporates a rotation-aware detection branch to adapt to varying object orientations. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves mAP@0.5 of 79.3% on the DroneVehicle dataset and mAP@0.5 of 81.6% on the DIOR-R dataset. The proposed method not only outperforms all compared methods in accuracy but also strikes a favorable efficiency–accuracy balance with an inference rate of 55–58 FPS.