ISO-DeTr: A novel detection transformer for industrial small object detection

Accurate object detection in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) images plays a crucial role in fields such as aviation, transportation, and agriculture. However, UAV images often contain a high proportion of small objects, and the limited resources of UAV platforms make it challenging for existing small object detection algorithms to balance detection performance and resource consumption. To address these issues, a lightweight small object detection algorithm called SRP-YOLO is proposed. Compared to the YOLOv8 network, the following improvements are made: first, a high-resolution detection head is designed; second, a receptive field attention convolution module tailored for small UAV objects is introduced to replace the standard convolution module, enhancing the detection capability for small objects and significantly improving their feature representation; Third, partial convolution is combined with C2f to replace some of the standard convolutions, fully leveraging the high-resolution information from shallow features. Finally, A normalized Gaussian Wasserstein Distance (NWD) metric is introduced to reduce the sensitivity of Intersection over Union (IoU) to minor positional deviations of small objects. On VisDrone-DET2019, SRP-YOLO reduces parameters while improving mAP 0.5 by 7.9%. Generalization tests on TinypersonV2 and RAIVD confirm significant gains in small object detection.

In recent years, small object detection has remained challenging in remote sensing tasks. Firstly, small objects inherently have fewer pixels, making them susceptible to interference from prominently featured larger objects during feature extraction. Secondly, existing detection methods solely based on the Intersection over Union (IOU) loss are disadvantageous for small object detection and fail to leverage the rich prior information in remote sensing images. Based on these observations, we propose a significant feature elimination and sample assessment network for small object detection called SESA-Net, based on the Facet derivative model. SESA-Net introduces prior information to the network through the directional derivatives characteristic of remote sensing images. The overall network comprises the ADM module and SIA strategy. The ADM module eliminates significant responses from shallow large objects, directing the network’s focus towards the features of shallow small objects. The Sample Importance Assessment (SIA) strategy addresses the limitations of the IOU loss function by using high-quality positive samples generated by ADM to provide an evaluation strategy for different positive samples of small objects. This enables the network to focus more on high-quality positive samples, thereby improving the accuracy of small object detection. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm has been validated on multiple datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/Xidian-AIGroup190726/RS-objectdetection-SESANet.

In this paper we describe an application of OCR techniques to quality control in industrial production. The purpose of the system is to verify the correct printing of numerical information in sachets with surgical material. Numerals are printed on an aluminium surface covered by a transparent plastic film, which can produce shadows or reflections in the image. The main difficulties for character recognition arise from low acquisition resolution, noise, heavy or light printing, and different printing patterns. The system must perform with an error rate lower than 0.1% and with the minimal computation time. Thus, we have decided to use well-known and simple algorithms, adding to them some refinements which take advantage of specific domain knowledge, making them more robust and reliable. The system is currently working with real production complying with the required specifications.

Rapid and non-destructive detection of benzo[a]pyrene in edible oils using excitation-emission matrix fluorescence spectroscopy combined with parallel factor analysis.

Recently, along with several technological advancements in cyber-physical systems, the revolution of Industry 4.0 has brought in an emerging concept named digital twin (DT), which shows its potential to break the barrier between the physical and cyber space in smart manufacturing. However, it is still difficult to analyze and estimate the real-time structural and environmental parameters in terms of their dynamic changes in digital twinning, especially when facing detection tasks of multiple small objects from a large-scale scene with complex contexts in modern manufacturing environments. In this article, we focus on a small object detection model for DT, aiming to realize the dynamic synchronization between a physical manufacturing system and its virtual representation. Three significant elements, including equipment, product, and operator, are considered as the basic environmental parameters to represent and estimate the dynamic characteristics and real-time changes in building a generic DT system of smart manufacturing workshop. A hybrid deep neural network model, based on the integration of MobileNetv2, YOLOv4, and Openpose, is constructed to identify the real-time status from physical manufacturing environment to virtual space. A learning algorithm is then developed to realize the efficient multitype small object detection based on the feature integration and fusion from both shallow and deep layers, in order to facilitate the modeling, monitoring, and optimizing of the whole manufacturing process in the DT system. Experiments and evaluations conducted in three different use cases demonstrate the effectiveness and usefulness of our proposed method, which can achieve a higher detection accuracy for DT in smart manufacturing.

Small object detection is a hard task to be sovled in object detection because the small object usually contain a few effective informations, which makes it very difficult to extract the discriminative features of small scale object. In addition, a key challenge in deep network for small object detectors is the large scale variation, where the performance of small object is poor due to the imbalanced optimization on various scale. In this paper, we propose a scale adaptive balance mechanism based on anchor-free framework for small object detection. Specifically, we design a new loss function to adapt the detection model to various object scale, which is able to alleviate the imbalance of object scale. Moreover, in feature extractor, the shallow feature maps of different receptive fields are added to the DLA-34 backbone for better extracting multi-scale features. Besides, the image block is used as a detection unit during inference, and the scale mismatch is thus overcome. Finally, the proposed method is verified on the Visdrone2019 dataset and the experimental results validate the effectiveness to detect small objects in the video image from drone monitoring.

Small object detection (SOD) is significant for many real-world applications, including criminal investigation, autonomous driving and remote sensing images. SOD has been one of the most challenging tasks in computer vision due to its low resolution and noise representation. With the development of deep learning, it has been introduced to boost the performance of SOD. In this paper, focusing on the difficulties of SOD, we analyze the deep learning-based SOD research papers from four perspectives, including boosting the resolution of input features, scale-aware training, incorporating contextual information and data augmentation. We also review the literature on crucial SOD tasks, including small face detection, small pedestrian detection and aerial image object detection. In addition, we conduct a thorough performance evaluation of generic SOD algorithms and methods for crucial SOD tasks on four well-known small object datasets. Our experimental results show that network configuring to boost the resolution of input features can enable significant performance gains on WIDER FACE and Tiny Person. Finally, several potential directions for future research in the area of SOD are provided.

Transformer-based methodologies in object detection have recently piqued considerable interest and have produced impressive results. DETR, an end-to-end object detection framework, ingeniously integrates the Transformer architecture, traditionally used in NLP, into computer vision for sequence-to-sequence prediction. Its enhanced variant, DINO, featuring improved denoising anchor boxes, has showcased remarkable performance on the COCO val2017 dataset. However, it often encounters challenges when applied to scenarios involving small object detection. Thus, we propose an innovative method for feature enhancement tailored to recursive prediction tasks, with a particular emphasis on augmenting small object detection performance. It primarily involves three enhancements: refining the backbone to favor feature maps that are more sensitive to small targets, incrementally augmenting the number of queries for small objects, and advancing the loss function for better performance. Specifically, The study incorporated the Switchable Atrous Convolution (SAC) mechanism, which features adaptable dilated convolutions, to increment the receptive field and thus elevate the innate feature extraction capabilities of the primary network concerning diminutive objects. Subsequently, a Recursive Small Object Prediction (RSP) module was designed to enhance the feature extraction of the prediction head for more precise network operations. Finally, the loss function was augmented with the Normalized Wasserstein Distance (NWD) metric, tailoring the loss function to suit small object detection better. The efficacy of the proposed model is empirically confirmed via testing on the VISDRONE2019 dataset. The comprehensive array of experiments indicates that our proposed model outperforms the extant DINO model in terms of average precision (AP) small object detection.

Small object detection is always a hot research direction in the field of computer vision, and widely used in traffic, production, industry, and other fields. A neural network for detecting small objects based on original Cascade RCNN is proposed. First, we modify the traditional feature pyramid network and introduce multi-branch dilated convolutions to enhance the feature information of the small target. Second, the feature extraction networks in original Cascade RCNN are replaced with multi-layer deformable convolution networks, which can better adapt to the geometric variations of detection target and huge size span of the objects in the same scene. Finally, Soft non-maximum suppression is also integrated into the network to avoid problems in dense object detection. To verify the practicability of our proposed network, we apply it to the garbage detection system. The experimental results show that compared with original Cascade RCNN and other commonly used target detection networks, our proposed method, with a recall rate >0.98 as well as mean average precision up to 0.964, performs better not only in small object detection but also in industrial applications.

Since small objects occupy less pixels in the image and are difficult to recognize. Small object detection has always been a research difficulty in the field of computer vision. Aiming at the problems of low sensitivity and poor detection performance of YOLOv3 for small objects. AFYOLO, which is more sensitive to small objects detection was proposed in this paper. Firstly, the DenseNet module is introduced into the low-level layers of backbone to enhance the transmission ability of objects information. At the same time, a new mechanism combining channel attention and spatial attention is introduced to improve the feature extraction ability of the backbone. Secondly, a new feature pyramid network (FPN) is proposed to better obtain the features of small objects. Finally, ablation studies on ImageNet classification task and MS-COCO object detection task verify the effectiveness of the proposed attention module and FPN. The results on Wider Face datasets show that the AP of the proposed method is 11.89%higher than that of YOLOv3 and 8.59%higher than that of YOLOv4. All of results show that AFYOLO has better ability for small object detection.

With special consideration for complex scenes and densely distributed small objects, this frequently leads to serious false and missed detections for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) images in small object detection scenarios. Consequently, we propose a UAV image small object detection algorithm, termed SMA-YOLO. Firstly, a parameter-free simple slicing convolution (SSC) module is integrated in the backbone network to slice the feature maps and enhance the features so as to effectively retain the features of small objects. Subsequently, to enhance the information exchange between upper and lower layers, we design a special multi-cross-scale feature pyramid network (M-FPN). The C2f-Hierarchical-Phantom Convolution (C2f-HPC) module in the network effectively reduces information loss by fine-grained multi-scale feature fusion. Ultimately, adaptive spatial feature fusion detection Head (ASFFDHead) introduces an additional P2 detection head to enhance the resolution of feature maps to better locate small objects. Moreover, the ASFF mechanism is employed to optimize the detection process by filtering out information conflicts during multi-scale feature fusion, thereby significantly optimizing small object detection capability. Using YOLOv8n as the baseline, SMA-YOLO is evaluated on the VisDrone2019 dataset, achieving a 7.4% improvement in mAP@0.5 and a 13.3% reduction in model parameters, and we also verified its generalization ability on VAUDT and RSOD datasets, which demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach.

Compared with conventional targets, small objects often face challenges such as smaller size, lower resolution, weaker contrast, and more background interference, making their detection more difficult. To address this issue, this paper proposes an improved small object detection method based on the YOLO11 model-PC-YOLO11s. The core innovation of PC-YOLO11s lies in the optimization of the detection network structure, which includes the following aspects: Firstly, PC-YOLO11s has adjusted the hierarchical structure of the detection network and added a P2 layer specifically for small object detection. By extracting the feature information of small objects in the high-resolution stage of the image, the P2 layer helps the network better capture small objects. At the same time, in order to reduce unnecessary calculations and lower the complexity of the model, we removed the P5 layer. In addition, we have introduced the coordinate spatial attention mechanism, which can help the network more accurately obtain the spatial and positional features required for small targets, thereby further improving detection accuracy. In the VisDrone2019 datasets, experimental results show that PC-YOLO11s outperforms other existing YOLO-series models in overall performance. Compared with the baseline YOLO11s model, PC-YOLO11s mAP@0.5 increased from 39.5% to 43.8%, mAP@0.5:0.95 increased from 23.6% to 26.3%, and the parameter count decreased from 9.416M to 7.103M. Not only that, we also applied PC-YOLO11s to tea bud datasets, and experiments showed that its performance is superior to other YOLO-series models. Experiments have shown that PC-YOLO11s exhibits excellent performance in small object detection tasks, with strong accuracy improvement and good generalization ability, which can meet the needs of small object detection in practical applications.

Detecting small objects is notoriously challenging due to their low resolution and noisy representation. Existing object detection pipelines usually detect small objects through learning representations of all the objects at multiple scales. However, the performance gain of such ad hoc architectures is usually limited to pay off the computational cost. In this work, we address the small object detection problem by developing a single architecture that internally lifts representations of small objects to "super-resolved" ones, achieving similar characteristics as large objects and thus more discriminative for detection. For this purpose, we propose a new Perceptual Generative Adversarial Network (Perceptual GAN) model that improves small object detection through narrowing representation difference of small objects from the large ones. Specifically, its generator learns to transfer perceived poor representations of the small objects to super-resolved ones that are similar enough to real large objects to fool a competing discriminator. Meanwhile its discriminator competes with the generator to identify the generated representation and imposes an additional perceptual requirement - generated representations of small objects must be beneficial for detection purpose - on the generator. Extensive evaluations on the challenging Tsinghua-Tencent 100K and the Caltech benchmark well demonstrate the superiority of Perceptual GAN in detecting small objects, including traffic signs and pedestrians, over well-established state-of-the-arts.

Deep learning-based detection from the perspective of small or tiny objects: A survey

Small object detection (SOD) system for comprehensive construction site safety monitoring