YOLC: You Only Look Clusters for Tiny Object Detection in Aerial ImagesChenguang Liu, Guangshuai Gao, Ziyue Huang et al.
Detecting objects from aerial images poses significant challenges due to the following factors: 1) Aerial images typically have very large sizes, generally with millions or even hundreds of millions of pixels, while computational resources are limited. 2) Small object size leads to insufficient information for effective detection. 3) Non-uniform object distribution leads to computational resource wastage. To address these issues, we propose YOLC (You Only Look Clusters), an efficient and effective framework that builds on an anchor-free object detector, CenterNet. To overcome the challenges posed by large-scale images and non-uniform object distribution, we introduce a Local Scale Module (LSM) that adaptively searches cluster regions for zooming in for accurate detection. Additionally, we modify the regression loss using Gaussian Wasserstein distance (GWD) to obtain high-quality bounding boxes. Deformable convolution and refinement methods are employed in the detection head to enhance the detection of small objects. We perform extensive experiments on two aerial image datasets, including Visdrone2019 and UAVDT, to demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed approach. Code is available at https://github.com/dawn-ech/YOLC.
Vision-Language Model for Object Detection and Segmentation: A Review and EvaluationYongchao Feng, Yajie Liu, Shuai Yang et al.
Vision-Language Model (VLM) have gained widespread adoption in Open-Vocabulary (OV) object detection and segmentation tasks. Despite they have shown promise on OV-related tasks, their effectiveness in conventional vision tasks has thus far been unevaluated. In this work, we present the systematic review of VLM-based detection and segmentation, view VLM as the foundational model and conduct comprehensive evaluations across multiple downstream tasks for the first time: 1) The evaluation spans eight detection scenarios (closed-set detection, domain adaptation, crowded objects, etc.) and eight segmentation scenarios (few-shot, open-world, small object, etc.), revealing distinct performance advantages and limitations of various VLM architectures across tasks. 2) As for detection tasks, we evaluate VLMs under three finetuning granularities: \textit{zero prediction}, \textit{visual fine-tuning}, and \textit{text prompt}, and further analyze how different finetuning strategies impact performance under varied task. 3) Based on empirical findings, we provide in-depth analysis of the correlations between task characteristics, model architectures, and training methodologies, offering insights for future VLM design. 4) We believe that this work shall be valuable to the pattern recognition experts working in the fields of computer vision, multimodal learning, and vision foundation models by introducing them to the problem, and familiarizing them with the current status of the progress while providing promising directions for future research. A project associated with this review and evaluation has been created at https://github.com/better-chao/perceptual_abilities_evaluation.