Oriented rectangle, a rotated bounding box for off-angle objects
Axis-aligned boxes waste area whenever the object is rotated. A parking lot from above, a ship at sea, a package on a conveyor, a line of scanned text: the box ends up half neighbor, and a detector trained on those labels learns the wrong thing.
LabelMe v6.2 adds oriented rectangle as a first-class shape type, with create, edit, save, and load all on the same footing as polygons and axis-aligned rectangles.
How it works
Three clicks to create. The first click anchors the starting corner. The second click fixes one full edge, which locks the orientation. The third click projects perpendicular to that edge to complete the rectangle, so the angle you committed in step two is what you keep.
Corners drag with parallelogram completion. Pull any corner and the opposite corner stays put; the two adjacent corners follow to keep all four angles at ninety degrees. The shape never deforms into a generic quad.
Edge midpoints rotate. Grab the midpoint of an edge and the whole shape pivots around its center. Width and height stay constant; only the heading changes.
An arrow shows orientation. A small marker on the canvas points along the box's local x-axis, so once you have twenty rotated boxes on the screen you can still tell which way each one is facing without expanding the shape.
When to reach for it
- Aerial views of vehicles. Cars in a parking lot, planes on a tarmac, ships in harbor. Axis-aligned boxes overlap their neighbors at every angle that isn't a multiple of ninety degrees.
- Packaged goods on a conveyor. Items rotate as they're placed; an oriented box stays tight whatever the heading.
- Scanned documents and signage. Lines of text and rotated logos give the recognizer a much cleaner crop than the enclosing axis-aligned rectangle.
- Anything you'll feed into an OBB detector. YOLO-OBB and similar models consume oriented boxes natively; producing them up front skips the polygon-to-OBB conversion step entirely.
If your downstream pipeline still wants axis-aligned boxes, draw axis-aligned. Oriented rectangle is for the cases where the heading carries information you don't want to throw away.
Where to find it
Update to LabelMe v6.2 from the downloads page. Oriented rectangle sits in the toolbar alongside the other shape tools, and AI-Points and AI-Box can produce one too if you'd rather click once and let SAM fit the box for you (see AI annotation outputs circles and rectangles, not just polygons).
See the v6.2 release notes for the full changelog. The shape landed in #1980, with a follow-up in #2079 to preserve the rectangle if you cancel the label dialog after drawing.
If anything behaves oddly when drawing or editing, open a GitHub issue or ask on Discord.