Small Object Detection by DETR via Information Augmentation and Adaptive Feature Fusion

TL;DR

This paper enhances small object detection in real-time models by introducing detailed feature augmentation and adaptive multi-scale feature fusion, significantly improving detection accuracy without sacrificing speed.

Contribution

It proposes a fine-grained path augmentation and an adaptive feature fusion method to improve small object detection in RT-DETR models.

Findings

Improved small object detection accuracy in RT-DETR.

Effective integration of detailed and semantic features.

Enhanced multi-scale feature fusion performance.

Abstract

The main challenge for small object detection algorithms is to ensure accuracy while pursuing real-time performance. The RT-DETR model performs well in real-time object detection, but performs poorly in small object detection accuracy. In order to compensate for the shortcomings of the RT-DETR model in small object detection, two key improvements are proposed in this study. Firstly, The RT-DETR utilises a Transformer that receives input solely from the final layer of Backbone features. This means that the Transformer's input only receives semantic information from the highest level of abstraction in the Deep Network, and ignores detailed information such as edges, texture or color gradients that are critical to the location of small objects at lower levels of abstraction. Including only deep features can introduce additional background noise. This can have a negative impact on the accuracy of small object detection. To address this issue, we propose the fine-grained path augmentation method. This method helps to locate small objects more accurately by providing detailed information to the deep network. So, the input to the transformer contains both semantic and detailed information. Secondly, In RT-DETR, the decoder takes feature maps of different levels as input after concatenating them with equal weight. However, this operation is not effective in dealing with the complex relationship of multi-scale information captured by feature maps of different sizes. Therefore, we propose an adaptive feature fusion algorithm that assigns learnable parameters to each feature map from different levels. This allows the model to adaptively fuse feature maps from different levels and effectively integrate feature information from different scales. This enhances the model's ability to capture object features at different scales, thereby improving the accuracy of detecting small objects.