Multi-scale Feature Fused Single Shot Detector for Small Object Detection in UAV Images

Abstract

Small object detection is a challenging computer vision problem due to their low feature representation in the images and factors such as occlusions and noise. In images captured from a camera mounted on an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), objects are usually acquired in small sizes depending on the UAV flight altitude. The state-of-the-art object detectors often have lower detection accuracy with small objects. New approaches of combining features at multi-levels in the network helps in improving the object detection performance. In this paper, we propose a multi-scale approach of low-level feature combinations with deconvolutional modules on a single shot multibox detection (SSD) object detector to improve the small object detection in images acquired from a UAV. The proposed SSD based architecture is evaluated on UAV datasets to compare its performance with the state-of-the-art detectors.