Efficient Small Object Detection with an Improved Region Proposal Networks

Although the state-of-the-art object detection methods, which depend on region proposal algorithms to hypothesize object locations, have achieved high detection accuracy, it still struggles in small-size object detection. In this paper, we present a novel method with a multi-scale and multi-tasking region proposal method to effectively detect small object. In the proposed method, multi-scale features and high-level features are employed to locate object position and identify object category, respectively. The main contributions of the proposed approach are two-fold: (1) A simpler way is used to improve the accuracy performance of small object detection, instead of the complex image pyramids and the complex combination framework, and make the object detection task more flexible. (2) Based on multi-scale and multi-tasking approaches, object location information in low layers and object semantic information in deep layers are made fully advantage respectively. The experimental results on the PASCAL VOC dataset show that the proposed method achieves the state-of-the art object detection accuracy.