Hi-OPD: Hierarchy-Aware Open-Prompt Detection for Remote Sensing Images

Hi-OPD addresses a failure mode left uncontrolled by flat open-prompt training: descendant retrieval need not persist under ancestor queries when multi-source remote sensing annotations exhibit inconsistent granularity and missing labels. A detector may localize car and van under atomic prompts yet miss the same instances under vehicle; flat AP does not expose this cross-level inconsistency. We propose Hi-OPD, a hierarchy-aware open-prompt detector, and construct RS153-HierOPD from 175,644 retained training image/tile records and 3.48M boxes mapped to 153 atomic categories with sparse hierarchy and alias relations. Hi-OPD learns ancestor retrieval through hierarchy-safe negative sampling, path multi-positive supervision, and one-way upward consistency, while per-source risk exclusion handles potentially missing labels. ConvVPE converts K-shot support boxes into text-compatible embeddings using detector-native features and the shared contrastive head. On Track A, Hi-OPD obtains 79.7/72.3 AP50 on DIOR/DOTA-v2.0, above the literature-reported OpenRSD results of 76.7/71.8. Under controlled training on the original converted annotations, the full hierarchy recipe raises DOTA-v2.0 parent AP50 from 7.2 to 71.5 and FAIR1M grandparent AP50 from 31.6 to 71.4, while DOTA-v2.0 atomic AP50 changes from 71.4 to 72.3. The text path reaches 99.7% CAR50 (0.3% violation) across the three common sources and 99.9%/0.1% on FAIR1M grandparent relations. On held-out VEDAI, text AP50 is 75.9, 6.2 points above OpenRSD. Joint AP and CAR show that explicit hierarchy training repairs this failure mode while retaining atomic detection and prompt transfer.