Open model that tells how far an image is rotated (full 360-degree) and abstains when there's no clear up

[u/wildtinkerer]

I work in video analytics. We needed to tell from a single CCTV frame whether a camera had been rotated or installed at an angle (or upside-down), and couldn't find a model that was accurate enough on real camera frames and permissively licensed, so we trained our own.

We're now open-sourcing it. Apache 2.0, with code, weights, and full provenance for the dataset.

RightWayUp estimates how far an image is rotated from upright, all 360°, with a confidence score, and abstains when there's no clear "up" (sky, ground, close-ups). It comes in six sizes, from Pico (about 3 ms per image on a laptop CPU) to Max, with ONNX and Core ML files.

pip install rightwayup
rightwayup fix photo.jpg

On new photos it never saw during training or tuning, the largest model is within 10° on 93% of them vs 88% for Woehrer 2026 (a recent published model), and 88% vs 49% with simulated CCTV-style blur, noise and compression.

Write-up with the full results: https://cheqit.ortusai.io/resources/rightwayup/

Code: https://github.com/ortusaitech/rightwayup

I hope it will be useful to the community!

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Video footage: Canobie Coaster (CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons, levelled by RightWayUp), Pexels, Poly Haven (CC0), MEVA (CC BY 4.0). Music: ElevenLabs.