Symmetry-Driven Gaussian Representation and Adaptive Assignment for Oriented Object Detection

Object Detection (OD) in Remote Sensing Imagery (RSI) encounters significant challenges such as multi-scale variation, high aspect ratios, and densely distributed objects. These challenges often result in misalignments among Bounding Box (BBox) representation, Label Assignment (LA) strategies, and regression loss functions. To address these limitations, this study proposes a novel detection framework, the Gaussian Detection (GaussianDet) Framework, that integrates probabilistic modeling with dynamic sample assignment to achieve more precise OD. The core design of this framework is inspired by the theory of geometric symmetry. Specifically, the radial symmetry of a two-dimensional Gaussian distribution is employed to capture the rotational and scale-invariant properties of Remote Sensing (RS) objects. By leveraging the axial symmetry of elliptical geometry, the proposed Gaussian Elliptical Intersection over Union (GEIoU) enables rotation-aligned matching, while Omni-dimensional Adaptive Assignment (ODAA) introduces dynamic symmetric constraints to optimize the spatial distribution of training samples. Specifically, a Flexible Bounding Box (FBBox) representation based on a 2D Gaussian distribution is introduced to more accurately characterize the shape, aspect ratio, and orientation of objects. In addition, the GEIoU is designed as a scale-invariant similarity metric to align regression loss with detection accuracy. To further enhance sample quality and feature learning, the ODAA strategy adaptively selects positive samples based on object scale and geometric constraints. Experimental results on the High-Resolution Ship Collection 2016 (HRSC2016) and University of Chinese Academy of Sciences–Aerial Object Detection (UCAS-AOD) datasets demonstrate that GaussianDet achieves mean Average Precision (mAP) scores of 90.53% and 96.24%, respectively. These results significantly outperform existing Oriented Object Detection (OOD) methods, thereby validating the effectiveness of the proposed approach and providing a solid theoretical foundation for future research in Remote Sensing Object Detection (RSOD).