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A real-time small target detection network

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Abstract

Target detection based on deep convolutional neural network has achieved excellent performance. However, small target detection is still one of the challenges in the field of computer vision. In this paper, we present an efficient network for real-time small target detection. The proposed network performs feature extraction using a modified Darknet53, while utilizing scale matching strategy to select suitable scales and anchor size for small target detection. In the network, we design an adaptive receptive field fusion module to increase the context information around the small targets by merging the features with different receptive field. Furthermore, we also propose an image cropping method in data preprocessing, aiming to make the targets trained in a wider range of scales. We conduct experiments on VEDAI dataset and small target dataset. Comparative results show that the proposed network achieved 74.5% mean average precision (mAP) at 50.0 FPS on VEDAI dataset and 45.7% mAP at 51.1 FPS on small target dataset which is better than other advanced target detectors.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang, 110016, Liaoning, China

    Moran Ju, Guangqi Liu & Haibo Luo

  2. Institutes for Robotics and Intelligent Manufacturing, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang, 110016, Liaoning, China

    Moran Ju, Guangqi Liu & Haibo Luo

  3. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China

    Moran Ju & Guangqi Liu

  4. Key Laboratory of Opt-Electronic Information Processing, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang, 110016, Liaoning, China

    Moran Ju, Guangqi Liu & Haibo Luo

  5. The Key Laboratory of Image Understanding and Computer Vision, Shenyang, 110016, Liaoning, China

    Moran Ju, Guangqi Liu & Haibo Luo

  6. McGill University, Montreal, QC, H3A 0G4, Canada

    Jiangning Luo

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  1. Moran Ju
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  2. Jiangning Luo
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  3. Guangqi Liu
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  4. Haibo Luo
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Correspondence to Haibo Luo.

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Ju, M., Luo, J., Liu, G. et al. A real-time small target detection network. SIViP 15, 1265–1273 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11760-021-01857-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11760-021-01857-x

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