Dome-DETR: DETR with Density-Oriented Feature-Query Manipulation for Efficient Tiny Object Detection
It addresses tiny object detection for applications like drone surveillance and autonomous systems, offering an incremental improvement over existing methods.
The paper tackled inefficient feature leverage and high computational costs in tiny object detection by proposing Dome-DETR, which achieved state-of-the-art performance with gains of +3.3 AP on AI-TOD-V2 and +2.5 AP on VisDrone while maintaining low complexity.
Tiny object detection plays a vital role in drone surveillance, remote sensing, and autonomous systems, enabling the identification of small targets across vast landscapes. However, existing methods suffer from inefficient feature leverage and high computational costs due to redundant feature processing and rigid query allocation. To address these challenges, we propose Dome-DETR, a novel framework with Density-Oriented Feature-Query Manipulation for Efficient Tiny Object Detection. To reduce feature redundancies, we introduce a lightweight Density-Focal Extractor (DeFE) to produce clustered compact foreground masks. Leveraging these masks, we incorporate Masked Window Attention Sparsification (MWAS) to focus computational resources on the most informative regions via sparse attention. Besides, we propose Progressive Adaptive Query Initialization (PAQI), which adaptively modulates query density across spatial areas for better query allocation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Dome-DETR achieves state-of-the-art performance (+3.3 AP on AI-TOD-V2 and +2.5 AP on VisDrone) while maintaining low computational complexity and a compact model size. Code is available at https://github.com/RicePasteM/Dome-DETR.