A novel Multi to Single Module for small object detection
This addresses the problem of detecting small objects in computer vision, which is incremental as it builds on existing methods like YOLOv5s with specific modules for feature enhancement.
The paper tackled the challenge of small object detection by proposing a Multi to Single Module (M2S) that improves feature extraction and refinement, resulting in accuracy gains of about 1.1% on VisDrone2021-DET and 15.68% on SeaDronesSeeV2 compared to a baseline.
Small object detection presents a significant challenge in computer vision and object detection. The performance of small object detectors is often compromised by a lack of pixels and less significant features. This issue stems from information misalignment caused by variations in feature scale and information loss during feature processing. In response to this challenge, this paper proposes a novel the Multi to Single Module (M2S), which enhances a specific layer through improving feature extraction and refining features. Specifically, M2S includes the proposed Cross-scale Aggregation Module (CAM) and explored Dual Relationship Module (DRM) to improve information extraction capabilities and feature refinement effects. Moreover, this paper enhances the accuracy of small object detection by utilizing M2S to generate an additional detection head. The effectiveness of the proposed method is evaluated on two datasets, VisDrone2021-DET and SeaDronesSeeV2. The experimental results demonstrate its improved performance compared with existing methods. Compared to the baseline model (YOLOv5s), M2S improves the accuracy by about 1.1\% on the VisDrone2021-DET testing dataset and 15.68\% on the SeaDronesSeeV2 validation set.