Affiliations: [a] Key Laboratory of Linguistic and Cultural Computing of Ministry of Education, Chinese National Information Technology Research Institute, Northwest Minzu University, Lanzhou, Gansu, China
| [b] China Mobile Group Design Institute Co., Ltd. Shaanxi Branch, Xi’an, Shaanxi, China
| [c] College of Mathematics and Computer Science, Northwest Minzu University, Lanzhou, Gansu, China
Abstract: Small object detection has important application value in the fields of autonomous driving and drone scene analysis. As one of the most advanced object detection algorithms, YOLOv3 suffers some challenges when detecting small objects, such as the problem of detection failure of small objects and occluded objects. To solve these problems, an improved YOLOv3 algorithm for small object detection is proposed. In the proposed method, the dilated convolutions mish (DCM) module is introduced into the backbone network of YOLOv3 to improve the feature expression ability by fusing the feature maps of different receptive fields. In the neck network of YOLOv3, the convolutional block attention module (CBAM) and multi-scale fusion module are introduced to select the important information for small object detection in the shallow network, suppress the uncritical information, and use the fusion module to fuse the feature maps of different scales, so as to improve the detection accuracy of the algorithm. In addition, the Soft-NMS and Complete-IOU (ClOU) strategies are applied to candidate frame screening, which improves the accuracy of the algorithm for the detection of occluded objects. The experimental results on MS COCO2017, VOC2007, VOC2012 datasets and the ablation experiments on MS COCO2017 datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves better accuracy in small object detection than the original YOLOv3 model.
Keywords: Small object detection, Dilated convolutions mish, Fusion module, Soft-NMS
