Awesome Tiny Object Detection

A curated list of Tiny Object Detection papers and related resources.

Table of Contents

• Updates
• Activities
• Papers
  • Tiny Object Detection
  • Tiny Face Detection
  • Tiny Pedestrian Detection
• Datasets
• Surveys
• Articles

Updates

• (04/13)
  • add paper QueryDet: Cascaded Sparse Query for Accelerating High-Resolution Small Object Detection
  • add dataset Detection and Tracking Meet Drones Challenge
• (03/30)
  • add paper Object Detection in Aerial Images: A Large-Scale Benchmark and Challenges
  • add paper MRDet: A Multi-Head Network for Accurate Oriented Object Detection in Aerial Images
• (03/24)
  • add paper Attentional Feature Refinement and Alignment Network for Aircraft Detection in SAR Imagery

Activities

• 1st Tiny Object Detection (TOD) Challenge Real-world Recognition from Low-quality Inputs (RLQ) [Project]
  • August 23rd - 27th, SEC, GLASGOW

Papers

Tiny Object Detection

• QueryDet: Cascaded Sparse Query for Accelerating High-Resolution Small Object Detection [Paper] [Code]
  • Chenhongyi Yang, Zehao Huang, Naiyan Wang CVPR 2022
• Object Detection in Aerial Images: A Large-Scale Benchmark and Challenges [Paper]
  • Jian Ding, Nan Xue, Gui-Song Xia, Xiang Bai, Wen Yang, Micheal Ying Yang, Serge Belongie, Jiebo Luo, Mihai Datcu, Marcello Pelillo, Liangpei Zhang TPAMI 2021
• MRDet: A Multi-Head Network for Accurate Oriented Object Detection in Aerial Images [Paper]
  • Ran Qin, Qingjie Liu, Guangshuai Gao, Di Huang, Yunhong Wang TGRS 2021
• Attentional Feature Refinement and Alignment Network for Aircraft Detection in SAR Imagery [Paper]
  • Yan Zhao, Lingjun Zhao, Zhong Liu, Dewen Hu, Gangyao Kuang, Li Liu Submitted to TGRS
• A Normalized Gaussian Wasserstein Distance for Tiny Object Detection [Paper]
  • Jinwang Wang, Chang Xu, Wen Yang, Lei Yu arXiv 2021
• Oriented Object Detection in Aerial Images with Box Boundary-Aware Vectors [Paper] [Code]
  • Jingru Yi, Pengxiang Wu, Bo Liu, Qiaoying Huang, Hui Qu, Dimitris Metaxas WACV 2021
• TPH-YOLOv5: Improved YOLOv5 Based on Transformer Prediction Head for Object Detection on Drone-captured Scenarios [Paper]
  • Xingkui Zhu, Shuchang Lyu, Xu Wang, Qi Zhao ICCV Workshop 2021
• Oriented Bounding Boxes for Small and Freely Rotated Objects [Paper]
  • Mohsen Zand, Ali Etemad, Michael Greenspan TGRS 2021
• Learning Calibrated-Guidance for Object Detection in Aerial Images [Paper] [Code]
  • Dong Liang, Zongqi Wei, Dong Zhang, Qixiang Geng, Liyan Zhang, Han Sun, Huiyu Zhou, Mingqiang Wei, Pan Gao arXiv 2021
• ReDet: A Rotation-equivariant Detector for Aerial Object Detection [Paper] [Code]
  • Jiaming Han, Jian Ding, Nan Xue, Gui-Song Xia CVPR 2021
• Object Detection in Aerial Images: A Large-Scale Benchmark and Challenges [Paper] [Code]
  • Jian Ding, Nan Xue, Gui-Song Xia, Xiang Bai, Wen Yang, Micheal Ying Yang, Serge Belongie, Jiebo Luo, Mihai Datcu, Marcello Pelillo, Liangpei Zhang arXiv 2021
• Effective Fusion Factor in FPN for Tiny Object Detection [Paper]
  • Yuqi Gong, Xuehui Yu, Yao Ding, Xiaoke Peng, Jian Zhao, Zhenjun Han WACV 2021
• End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers [Paper] [Code]
  • Nicolas Carion, Francisco Massa, Gabriel Synnaeve, Nicolas Usunier, Alexander Kirillov, Sergey Zagoruyko ECCV 2020
• Corner Proposal Network for Anchor-free, Two-stage Object Detection [Paper] [Code]
  • Kaiwen Duan, Lingxi Xie, Honggang Qi, Song Bai, Qingming Huang, Qi Tian ECCV 2020
• HoughNet: Integrating near and long-range evidence for bottom-up object detection [Paper] [Code]
  • Nermin Samet, Samet Hicsonmez, Emre Akbas ECCV 2020
• EfficientDet: Scalable and Efficient Object Detection [Paper] [Code] [PyTorch] [PyTorch] [PyTorch] [TensorFlow]
  • Mingxing Tan, Ruoming Pang, Quoc V. Le CVPR 2020
• Efficient Object Detection in Large Images Using Deep Reinforcement Learning [Paper]
  • Burak Uzkent, Christopher Yeh, Stefano Ermon WACV 2020
• Scale Match for Tiny Person Detection [Paper] [Benchmark]
  • Xuehui Yu, Yuqi Gong, Nan Jiang, Qixiang Ye, Zhenjun Han WACV 2020
• MultiResolution Attention Extractor for Small Object Detection [Paper]
  • Fan Zhang, Licheng Jiao, Lingling Li, Fang Liu, Xu Liu arXiv 2020
• Intrinsic Relationship Reasoning for Small Object Detection [Paper]
  • Kui Fu, Jia Li, Lin Ma, Kai Mu, Yonghong Tian arXiv 2020
• HRDNet: High-resolution Detection Network for Small Objects [Paper]
  • Ziming Liu, Guangyu Gao, Lin Sun, Zhiyuan Fang arXiv 2020
• Extended Feature Pyramid Network for Small Object Detection [Paper]
  • Chunfang Deng, Mengmeng Wang, Liang Liu, and Yong Liu arXiv 2020
• MatrixNets: A New Scale and Aspect Ratio Aware Architecture for Object Detection [Paper] [Code]
  • Abdullah Rashwan, Rishav Agarwal, Agastya Kalra, Pascal Poupart arXiv 2020
• Cross-dataset Training for Class Increasing Object Detection [Paper]
  • Yongqiang Yao, Yan Wang, Yu Guo, Jiaojiao Lin, Hongwei Qin, Junjie Yan arXiv 2020
• TBC-Net: A real-time detector for infrared small target detection using semantic constraint [Paper]
  • Mingxin Zhao, Li Cheng, Xu Yang, Peng Feng, Liyuan Liu, Nanjian Wu arXiv 2020
• RepPoints V2: Verification Meets Regression for Object Detection [Paper] [Code]
  • Yihong Chen, Zheng Zhang, Yue Cao, Liwei Wang, Stephen Lin, Han Hu arXiv 2020
• M2Det: A Single-Shot Object Detector based on Multi-Level Feature Pyramid Network [Paper] [Code]
  • Qijie Zhao, Tao Sheng, Yongtao Wang, Zhi Tang, Ying Chen, Ling Cai, Haibin Ling AAAI 2019
• Better to Follow, Follow to Be Better: Towards Precise Supervision of Feature Super-Resolution for Small Object Detection [Paper] [Project]
  • Junhyug Noh, Wonho Bae, Wonhee Lee, Jinhwan Seo, Gunhee Kim ICCV 2019
• Enriched Feature Guided Refinement Network for Object Detection [Paper] [Code]
  • Jing Nie, Rao Muhammad Anwer, Hisham Cholakkal, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Yanwei Pang, Ling Shao ICCV 2019
• RepPoints: Point Set Representation for Object Detection [Paper] [Code]
  • Ze Yang, Shaohui Liu, Han Hu, Liwei Wang, Stephen Lin ICCV 2019
• Scale-Aware Trident Networks for Object Detection [Paper] [Code]
  • Yanghao Li, Yuntao Chen, Naiyan Wang, Zhaoxiang Zhang ICCV 2019
• SCRDet: Towards More Robust Detection for Small, Cluttered and Rotated Objects [Paper]
  • Xue Yang, Jirui Yang, Junchi Yan, Yue Zhang, Tengfei Zhang, Zhi Guo, Xian Sun, Kun Fu ICCV 2019
• Clustered Object Detection in Aerial Images [Paper]
  • Fan Yang, Heng Fan, Peng Chu, Erik Blasch, Haibin Ling ICCV 2019
• The Power of Tiling for Small Object Detection [Paper]
  • F. Ozge Unel, Burak O. Ozkalayci, Cevahir Cigla CVPR Workshop 2019
• Learning Object-Wise Semantic Representation for Detection in Remote Sensing Imagery [Paper]
  • Chengzheng Li, Chunyan Xu, Zhen Cui, Dan Wang, Zequn Jie, Tong Zhang, Jian Yang CVPR Workshop 2019
• AugFPN: Improving Multi-scale Feature Learning for Object Detection [Paper]
  • Chaoxu Guo, Bin Fan, Qian Zhang, Shiming Xiang, Chunhong Pan CoRR 2019, CVPR2020
• R2-CNN: Fast Tiny Object Detection in Large-scale Remote Sensing Images [Paper]
  • Jiangmiao Pang, Cong Li, Jianping Shi, Zhihai Xu, Huajun Feng TGRS 2019
• R3Det: Refined Single-Stage Detector with Feature Refinement for Rotating Object [Paper] [Code]
  • Yang, Xue and Liu, Qingqing and Yan, Junchi and Li, Ang and Zhiqiang, Zhang and Gang, Yu AAAI 2021
• SpineNet: Learning Scale-Permuted Backbone for Recognition and Localization [Paper]
  • Xianzhi Du, Tsung-Yi Lin, Pengchong Jin, Golnaz Ghiasi, Mingxing Tan, Yin Cui, Quoc V. Le, Xiaodan Song arXiv 2019
• Learning Spatial Fusion for Single-Shot Object Detection [Paper] [Code]
  • Songtao Liu, Di Huang, Yunhong Wang arXiv 2019
• Augmentation for small object detection [Paper] [Code]
  • Mate Kisantal, Zbigniew Wojna, Jakub Murawski, Jacek Naruniec, Kyunghyun Cho arXiv 2019
• Small Object Detection using Context and Attention [Paper]
  • Jeong-Seon Lim, Marcella Astrid, Hyun-Jin Yoon, Seung-Ik Lee arXiv 2019
• Single-Shot Refinement Neural Network for Object Detection [Paper] [Code] [PyTorch]
  • Shifeng Zhang, Longyin Wen, Xiao Bian, Zhen Lei, Stan Z. Li CVPR 2018
• An Analysis of Scale Invariance in Object Detection - SNIP [Paper]
  • Bharat Singh, Larry S. Davis CVPR 2018
• Cascade R-CNN Delving into High Quality Object Detection [Paper] [Code]
  • Zhaowei Cai, Nuno Vasconcelos CVPR 2018
• Single-Shot Object Detection with Enriched Semantics [Paper]
  • Zhishuai Zhang, Siyuan Qiao, Cihang Xie, Wei Shen, Bo Wang, Alan L. Yuille CVPR 2018
• Scale-Transferrable Object Detection [Paper] [Code]
  • Peng Zhou, Bingbing Ni, Cong Geng, Jianguo Hu, Yi Xu CVPR 2018
• Deep Feature Pyramid Reconfiguration for Object Detection [Paper]
  • Tao Kong, Fuchun Sun, Wenbing Huang, Huaping Liu ECCV 2018
• DetNet: A Backbone network for Object Detection [Paper] [Code]
  • Zeming Li, Chao Peng, Gang Yu, Xiangyu Zhang, Yangdong Deng, Jian Sun ECCV 2018
• SOD-MTGAN: Small Object Detection via Multi-Task Generative Adversarial Network [Paper]
  • Yancheng Bai, Yongqiang Zhang, Mingli Ding, Bernard Ghanem ECCV 2018
• SNIPER: Efficient Multi-Scale Training [Paper] [Code]
  • Bharat Singh, Mahyar Najibi, Larry S. Davis NeurIPS 2018
• YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement [Paper] [Project] [Code]
  • Joseph Redmon, Ali Farhadi arXiv 2018
• You Only Look Twice: Rapid Multi-Scale Object Detection In Satellite Imagery [Paper] [Code]
  • Adam Van Etten arXiv 2018
• MSDNN: Multi-Scale Deep Neural Network for Salient Object Detection [Paper]
  • Fen Xiao, Wenzheng Deng, Liangchan Peng, Chunhong Cao, Kai Hu, Xieping Gao arXiv 2018
• MDSSD: Multi-scale Deconvolutional Single Shot Detector for Small Objects [Paper]
  • Mingliang Xu, Lisha Cui, Pei Lv, Xiaoheng Jiang, Jianwei Niu, Bing Zhou, Meng Wang arXiv 2018
• Perceptual Generative Adversarial Networks for Small Object Detection [Paper]
  • Jianan Li, Xiaodan Liang, Yunchao Wei, Tingfa Xu, Jiashi Feng, Shuicheng Yan CVPR 2017
• Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection [Paper]
  • Tsung-Yi Lin, Piotr Dollár, Ross Girshick, Kaiming He, Bharath Hariharan, Serge Belongie CVPR 2017
• DSSD : Deconvolutional Single Shot Detector [Paper] [Code]
  • Cheng-Yang Fu, Wei Liu, Ananth Ranga, Ambrish Tyagi, Alexander C. Berg CVPR 2017
• Accurate Single Stage Detector Using Recurrent Rolling Convolution [Paper] [Code]
  • Jimmy Ren, Xiaohao Chen, Jianbo Liu, Wenxiu Sun, Jiahao Pang, Qiong Yan, Yu-Wing Tai, Li Xu CVPR 2017
• Focal Loss for Dense Object Detection [Paper] [PyTorch]
  • Tsung-Yi Lin, Priya Goyal, Ross Girshick, Kaiming He, Piotr Dollár ICCV 2017
• Deformable Convolutional Networks [Paper] [Code]
  • Jifeng Dai, Haozhi Qi, Yuwen Xiong, Yi Li, Guodong Zhang, Han Hu, Yichen Wei ICCV 2017
• Feature-Fused SSD: Fast Detection for Small Objects [Paper] [Code]
  • Guimei Cao, Xuemei Xie, Wenzhe Yang, Quan Liao, Guangming Shi, Jinjian Wu ICGIP 2017
• FSSD: Feature Fusion Single Shot Multibox Detector [Paper] [Code]
  • Zuoxin Li, Fuqiang Zhou arXiv 2017
• Inside-Outside Net: Detecting Objects in Context with Skip Pooling and Recurrent Neural Networks [Paper]
  • Sean Bell, C. Lawrence Zitnick, Kavita Bala, Ross Girshick CVPR 2016

Tiny Face Detection

• TinaFace: Strong but Simple Baseline for Face Detection [Paper] [Code]
  • Yanjia Zhu, Hongxiang Cai, Shuhan Zhang, Chenhao Wang, Yichao Xiong arXiv 2020
• Robust Face Detection via Learning Small Faces on Hard Images [Paper] [Code]
  • Zhishuai Zhang, Wei Shen, Siyuan Qiao, Yan Wang, Bo Wang, Alan Yuille WACV 2020
• Finding Tiny Faces in the Wild with Generative Adversarial Network [Paper]
  • Yancheng Bai, Yongqiang Zhang, Mingli Ding, Bernard Ghanem CVPR 2018
• Seeing Small Faces from Robust Anchor’s Perspective [Paper]
  • Chenchen Zhu, Ran Tao, Khoa Luu, Marios Savvides CVPR 2018
• Face-MagNet: Magnifying Feature Maps to Detect Small Faces [Paper]
  • Pouya Samangouei, Mahyar Najibi, Larry Davis, Rama Chellappa WACV 2018
• Finding Tiny Faces [Paper] [Project] [Code]
  • Peiyun Hu, Deva Ramanan CVPR 2017
• S3FD: Single Shot Scale-invariant Face Detector [Paper]
  • Shifeng Zhang Xiangyu Zhu Zhen Lei∗ Hailin Shi Xiaobo Wang Stan Z. Li ICCV 2017
• Detecting and counting tiny faces [Paper]
  • Alexandre Attia, Sharone Dayan arXiv 2018

Tiny Pedestrian Detection

• High-level Semantic Feature Detection: A New Perspective for Pedestrian Detection [Paper] [Code]
  • Wei Liu, ShengCai Liao, Weiqiang Ren, Weidong Hu, Yinan Yu CVPR 2019
• Feature Selective Anchor-Free Module for Single-Shot Object Detection [Paper] [PyTorch] [TensorFlow]
  • Chenchen Zhu, Yihui He, Marios Savvides CVPR 2019
• Seek and You Will Find: A New Optimized Framework for Efficient Detection of Pedestrian [Paper]
  • Sudip Das, Partha Sarathi Mukherjee, Ujjwal Bhattacharya arXiv 2019
• Small-scale Pedestrian Detection Based on Somatic Topology Localization and Temporal Feature Aggregation [Paper]
  • Tao Song, Leiyu Sun, Di Xie, Haiming Sun, Shiliang Pu ECCV 2018

Datasets

• Detection and Tracking Meet Drones Challenge [Paper] [Project] [Code]
  • Pengfei Zhu, Longyin Wen, Dawei Du, Xiao Bian, Heng Fan, Qinghua Hu, Haibin Ling TPAMI 2021
• Tiny Object Detection in Aerial Images [Paper] [Code]
  • Jinwang Wang, Wen Yang, Haowen Guo, Ruixiang Zhang, Gui-Song Xia ICPR 2021
• iSAID: A Large-scale Dataset for Instance Segmentation in Aerial Images [Paper] [Project]
  • Syed Waqas Zamir, Aditya Arora, Akshita Gupta, Salman Khan, Guolei Sun, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Fan Zhu, Ling Shao, Gui-Song Xia, Xiang Bai CVPRW 2019
• BIRDSAI: A Dataset for Detection and Tracking in Aerial Thermal Infrared Videos [Paper] [Project]
  • Elizabeth Bondi, Raghav Jain, Palash Aggrawal, Saket Anand, Robert Hannaford, Ashish Kapoor, Jim Piavis, Shital Shah, Lucas Joppa, Bistra Dilkina, Milind Tambe WACV 2020
• TinyPerson Dataset for Tiny Person Detection [Paper] [Project]
  • Yu, Xuehui and Gong, Yuqi and Jiang, Nan and Ye, Qixiang and Han, Zhenjun WACV 2020
• The EuroCity Persons Dataset: A Novel Benchmark for Object Detection [Paper] [Project]
  • Braun, Markus and Krebs, Sebastian and Flohr, Fabian B. and Gavrila, Dariu M. TPAMI 2019
• WiderPerson: A Diverse Dataset for Dense Pedestrian Detection in the Wild [Paper] [Project]
  • Shifeng Zhang, Yiliang Xie, Jun Wan, Hansheng Xia, Stan Z. Li, Guodong Guo TMM 2019
• DOTA: A Large-scale Dataset for Object Detection in Aerial Images [Paper] [Project]
  • Gui-Song Xia, Xiang Bai, Jian Ding, Zhen Zhu, Serge Belongie, Jiebo Luo, Mihai Datcu, Marcello Pelillo, Liangpei Zhang CVPR 2018
• NightOwls: A Pedestrians at Night Dataset [Paper] [Project]
  • Lukáš Neumann, Michelle Karg, Shanshan Zhang, Christian Scharfenberger, Eric Piegert, Sarah Mistr, Olga Prokofyeva, Robert Thiel, Andrea Vedaldi, Andrew Zisserman, and Bernt Schiele ACCV 2018
• DeepScores – A Dataset for Segmentation, Detection and Classification of Tiny Objects [Paper] [Project] [Code]
  • Lukas Tuggener, Ismail Elezi, Jurgen Schmidhuber, Marcello Pelillo, Thilo Stadelmann ICPR 2018
• Bosch Small Traffic Lights Dataset [Paper] [Project] [Code]
  • Karsten Behrendt, Libor Novak, Rami Botros ICRA 2017
• CityPersons: A Diverse Dataset for Pedestrian Detection [Paper]
  • Shanshan Zhang, Rodrigo Benenson, Bernt Schiele arXiv 2017
• WIDER FACE: A Face Detection Benchmark [Paper] [Project]
  • Shuo Yang, Ping Luo, Chen Change Loy, Xiaoou Tang CVPR 2016
• Small Object Dataset [Paper] [Project]
  • Zheng Ma, Lei Yu, Antoni B. Chan CVPR 2015
• Caltech Pedestrian Detection Benchmark [Paper] [Paper] [Project]
  • Piotr Dollár, Christian Wojek, Bernt Schiele, Pietro Perona CVPR 2009, TPAMI 2012
• Penn-Fudan Database for Pedestrian Detection and Segmentation [Paper] [Project]
  • Liming Wang, Jianbo Shi, Gang Song, I-fan Shen ACCV 2007

Surveys

• Model Rubik's Cube: Twisting Resolution, Depth and Width for TinyNets [Paper] [Code]
  • Kai Han, Yunhe Wang, Qiulin Zhang, Wei Zhang, Chunjing Xu, Tong Zhang NeurIPS 2020
• A Survey of Deep Learning-based Object Detection [Paper]
  • Licheng Jiao, Fan Zhang, Fang Liu, Shuyuan Yang, Lingling Li, Zhixi Feng, Rong Qu IEEE Access 2019
• Recent Advances in Deep Learning for Object Detection [Paper]
  • Xiongwei Wu, Doyen Sahoo, Steven C.H. Hoi CoRR 2019
• Imbalance Problems in Object Detection: A Review [Paper] [Project]
  • Kemal Oksuz, Baris Can Cam, Sinan Kalkan, Emre Akbas TPAMI 2020
• Object Detection in 20 Years: A Survey [Paper]
  • Zhengxia Zou, Zhenwei Shi, Yuhong Guo, Jieping Ye submitted to TPAMI 2019
• Speed/accuracy trade-offs for modern convolutional object detectors [Paper]
  • Jonathan Huang, Vivek Rathod, Chen Sun, Menglong Zhu, Anoop Korattikara, Alireza Fathi, Ian Fischer, Zbigniew Wojna, Yang Song, Sergio Guadarrama, Kevin Murphy CVPR 2017

Articles

• Tackling the Small Object Problem in Object Detection (Video)
• Small objects detection problem - Medium
• 提升小目标检测的思路 - Zhihu
• How do you do object detection using CNNs on small objects like ping pong balls? - Quora
• 深度学习在 small object detection 有什么进展? - Zhihu
• 小目标检测问题中“小目标”如何定义？其主要技术难点在哪？有哪些比较好的传统的或深度学习方法？ - Zhihu