Deep Learning for Small and Tiny Object Detection: A Survey

Abstract

In recent years, thanks to the development of Deep Learning methods, there has been significant progress in object detection and other computer vision tasks. While generic object detection is becoming less of an issue for modern algorithms, with the Average Precision for medium and large objects in the COCO dataset approaching 70 and 80 percent, respectively, small object detection still remains an unsolved problem. Limited appearance information, blurring, and low signal-to-noise ratio cause state-of-the-art general detectors to fail when applied to small objects. Traditional feature extractors rely on downsampling, which can cause the smallest objects to disappear, and standard anchor assignment methods have proven to be less effective when used to detect low-pixel instances. In this work, we perform an exhaustive review of the literature related to small and tiny object detection. We aggregate the definitions of small and tiny objects, distinguish between small absolute and small relative sizes, and highlight their challenges. We comprehensively discuss datasets, metrics, and methods dedicated to small and tiny objects, and finally, we make a quantitative comparison on three publicly available datasets.