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RFSOD: a lightweight single-stage detector for real-time embedded applications to detect small-size objects

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Abstract

Small-size object detection (SOD) is one of the challenging problems in computer vision applications. SOD is highly useful in defense, military, surveillance, medical, industrial and analysis in sports applications. Various algorithms were developed in the past to solve the problem of SOD. However, the algorithms developed are not suitable for real-time applications. In this work, a convolutional neural network architecture based on YOLO is proposed to enhance small objects' detection performance. The proposed network is inspired by the ideas of Residual blocks, Densenet, Feature Pyramidal Network, Cross stage partial connections, and 1 × 1 convolutions. The Receptive field and the reuse of feature maps are the main factors in the design of the architecture and is hence referred to as RFSOD. It is developed as a lightweight network to suit real-time applications and can run smoothly on single-board computers such as Jetson Nano, Tx2, Raspberry Pi and the like. The proposed model is evaluated on various public datasets such as VHR10, BCCD dataset and few small-size objects from the MS COCO dataset. This work is motivated by the need to develop a vision system for a badminton-playing robot. Therefore, the proposed model is also tested on a custom-made shuttlecock dataset. The model's performance is compared with the state-of-the-art deep learning models that are suitable for real-time applications. The hardware implementation of the proposed model was carried out on Jetson Nano, Raspberry Pi4 and a Laptop with an i5 processor. Improved Detection accuracy was observed on small objects. More than 2 × detection speed was obtained on Raspberry Pi, and i5 processor while 30% improvement was observed on Jetson Nano with real-time videos.

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Availability of data and material

All the data used in this work are available from the corresponding author upon request.

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The codes used are available from the corresponding author upon request.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the Government of India for the Technical Education Quality Improvement Program (TEQIP III), coordinators of TEQIP III and Dean, Research and consultancy at National Institute of Technology Calicut for providing financial aid to procure 2080ti GPU-workstation and Baumer high-speed cameras.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Robotics Lab, Department of Mechanical Engineering, National Institute of Technology Calicut, Kozhikode, Kerala, India

    A. N. Amudhan & A. P. Sudheer

  2. Department of Computer Science Engineering, National Institute of Technology Calicut, Kozhikode, Kerala, India

    Shah Rutvik Vrajesh & A. Lijiya

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  1. A. N. Amudhan
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  2. Shah Rutvik Vrajesh
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  3. A. P. Sudheer
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  4. A. Lijiya
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Contributions

AAN: conceptualization, methodology, data acquisition, data curation, interpretation of data, software, visualization, writing—original draft. SRV: Data collection, software. SAP: Formal analysis, writing—review and editing, supervision, funding acquisition. LA: Writing—review and editing, supervision.

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Correspondence to A. P. Sudheer.

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Amudhan, A.N., Vrajesh, S.R., Sudheer, A.P. et al. RFSOD: a lightweight single-stage detector for real-time embedded applications to detect small-size objects. J Real-Time Image Proc 19, 133–146 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11554-021-01170-3

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