Focus-and-Detect: A small object detection framework for aerial images

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Koyun O. C., Keser R. K., Akkaya I. B., Töreyin B. U.

SIGNAL PROCESSING-IMAGE COMMUNICATION, cilt.104, 2022 (SCI-Expanded) identifier identifier identifier

  • Yayın Türü: Makale / Tam Makale
  • Cilt numarası: 104
  • Basım Tarihi: 2022
  • Doi Numarası: 10.1016/j.image.2022.116675
  • Dergi Adı: SIGNAL PROCESSING-IMAGE COMMUNICATION
  • Derginin Tarandığı İndeksler: Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED), Scopus, Academic Search Premier, Aerospace Database, Applied Science & Technology Source, Communication Abstracts, Computer & Applied Sciences, INSPEC, Metadex, Civil Engineering Abstracts
  • Anahtar Kelimeler: Object detection, Small object detection, Region search, Aerial images
  • İstanbul Teknik Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet

Özet

Despite recent advances, object detection in aerial images is still a challenging task. Specific problems in aerial images makes the detection problem harder, such as small objects, densely packed objects, objects in different sizes and with different orientations. To address small object detection problem, we propose a two-stage object detection framework called "Focus-and-Detect". The first stage which consists of an object detector network supervised by a Gaussian Mixture Model, generates clusters of objects constituting the focused regions. The second stage, which is also an object detector network, predicts objects within the focal regions. Incomplete Box Suppression (IBS) method is also proposed to overcome the truncation effect of region search approach. Results indicate that the proposed two-stage framework achieves an AP score of 42.06 on VisDrone validation dataset, surpassing all other state-of-the-art small object detection methods reported in the literature, to the best of authors' knowledge.