mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Augmentation for small object detection

arXiv 1902.07296 ↗First posted 19 Feb 2019cs.CVcited by 73

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Abstract (arXiv)

In recent years, object detection has experienced impressive progress. Despite these improvements, there is still a significant gap in the performance between the detection of small and large objects. We analyze the current state-of-the-art model, Mask-RCNN, on a challenging dataset, MS COCO. We show that the overlap between small ground-truth objects and the predicted anchors is much lower than the expected IoU threshold. We conjecture this is due to two factors; (1) only a few images are containing small objects, and (2) small objects do not appear enough even within each image containing them. We thus propose to oversample those images with small objects and augment each of those images by copy-pasting small objects many times. It allows us to trade off the quality of the detector on large objects with that on small objects. We evaluate different pasting augmentation strategies, and ultimately, we achieve 9.7% relative improvement on the instance segmentation and 7.1% on the object detection of small objects, compared to the current state of the art method on MS COCO.

Key facts. Cited by 73 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 19 Feb 2019.

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Citing papers per year: 2021: 13; 2022: 16; 2023: 12; 2024: 10; 2025: 14; 2026: 8.

73 papers.

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  1. 2021Embracing Single Stride 3D Object Detector with Sparse Transformercited by 193
  2. 2022Towards Large-Scale Small Object Detection: Survey and Benchmarkscited by 119
  3. 2022Slicing Aided Hyper Inference and Fine-tuning for Small Object Detectioncited by 101
  4. 2021QueryDet: Cascaded Sparse Query for Accelerating High-Resolution Small Object Detectioncited by 70
  5. 2022Detecting tiny objects in aerial images: A normalized Wasserstein distance and a new benchmarkcited by 56
  6. 2022RFLA: Gaussian Receptive Field based Label Assignment for Tiny Object Detectioncited by 51
  7. 2024AeroGen: Enhancing Remote Sensing Object Detection with Diffusion-Driven Data Generationcited by 32
  8. 2024DQ-DETR: DETR with Dynamic Query for Tiny Object Detectioncited by 27
  9. 2025Enhance Then Search: An Augmentation-Search Strategy with Foundation Models for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Object Detectioncited by 24
  10. 2022Focus-and-Detect: A Small Object Detection Framework for Aerial Imagescited by 19
  11. 2021Remote Sensing Image Super-resolution and Object Detection: Benchmark and State of the Artcited by 17
  12. 2022Back to Reality: Weakly-supervised 3D Object Detection with Shape-guided Label Enhancementcited by 17
38 more
  1. 2021SSPNet: Scale Selection Pyramid Network for Tiny Person Detection from UAV Imagescited by 16
  2. 2022A Guide to Image and Video based Small Object Detection using Deep Learning : Case Study of Maritime Surveillancecited by 14
  3. 2024Relaxed Equivariance via Multitask Learningcited by 13
  4. 2025FBRT-YOLO: Faster and Better for Real-Time Aerial Image Detectioncited by 13
  5. 2021YOLO-Z: Improving small object detection in YOLOv5 for autonomous vehiclescited by 12
  6. 2022Tiny Object Tracking: A Large-scale Dataset and A Baselinecited by 11
  7. 2021A Comparative Review of Recent Few-Shot Object Detection Algorithmscited by 10
  8. 2022Self-supervised Transparent Liquid Segmentation for Robotic Pouringcited by 9
  9. 2024Visible and Clear: Finding Tiny Objects in Difference Mapcited by 9
  10. 2024A Simple Background Augmentation Method for Object Detection with Diffusion Modelcited by 9
  11. 2022Learning to Act with Affordance-Aware Multimodal Neural SLAMcited by 8
  12. 2021A Comprehensive Approach for UAV Small Object Detection with Simulation-based Transfer Learning and Adaptive Fusioncited by 7
  13. 2023Oriented object detection in optical remote sensing images using deep learning: a surveycited by 7
  14. 2023EdgeYOLO: An Edge-Real-Time Object Detectorcited by 6
  15. 2025Dome-DETR: DETR with Density-Oriented Feature-Query Manipulation for Efficient Tiny Object Detectioncited by 6
  16. 2026YOLO26: An Analysis of NMS-Free End to End Framework for Real-Time Object Detectioncited by 6
  17. 2021Tackling the Background Bias in Sparse Object Detection via Cropped Windowscited by 5
  18. 2024Similarity Distance-Based Label Assignment for Tiny Object Detectioncited by 5
  19. 2022Self-Supervised Learning as a Means To Reduce the Need for Labeled Data in Medical Image Analysiscited by 4
  20. 20233D Small Object Detection with Dynamic Spatial Pruningcited by 4
  21. 2023VIPriors 3: Visual Inductive Priors for Data-Efficient Deep Learning Challengescited by 4
  22. 2024Domain Adaptive Detection of MAVs: A Benchmark and Noise Suppression Networkcited by 4
  23. 2021A Survey on Deep Domain Adaptation and Tiny Object Detection Challenges, Techniques and Datasetscited by 3
  24. 2022Global Meets Local: Effective Multi-Label Image Classification via Category-Aware Weak Supervisioncited by 3
  25. 2023Rethinking Intersection Over Union for Small Object Detection in Few-Shot Regimecited by 3
  26. 2026EFSI-DETR: Efficient Frequency-Semantic Integration for Real-Time Small Object Detection in UAV Imagerycited by 3
  27. 2022Light In The Black: An Evaluation of Data Augmentation Techniques for COVID-19 CT's Semantic Segmentationcited by 2
  28. 2023Deep-NFA: a Deep textita contrario Framework for Small Object Detectioncited by 2
  29. 2023Uncertainty-Aware Gradient Stabilization for Small Object Detectioncited by 2
  30. 2025PointSplit: Towards On-device 3D Object Detection with Heterogeneous Low-power Acceleratorscited by 2
  31. 2021Estimates of maize plant density from UAV RGB images using Faster-RCNN detection model: impact of the spatial resolutioncited by 1
  32. 2021Small Object Detection for Near Real-Time Egocentric Perception in a Manual Assembly Scenariocited by 1
  33. 2022Birds' Eye View: Measuring Behavior and Posture of Chickens as a Metric for Their Well-Beingcited by 1
  34. 2023YOLO-Drone:Airborne real-time detection of dense small objects from high-altitude perspectivecited by 1
  35. 2024Small Object Tracking in LiDAR Point Cloud: Learning the Target-awareness Prototype and Fine-grained Search Regioncited by 1
  36. 2024Simple In-place Data Augmentation for Surveillance Object Detectioncited by 1
  37. 2025YOLO-RS: Remote Sensing Enhanced Crop Detection Methodscited by 1
  38. 2025Cross-DINO: Cross the Deep MLP and Transformer for Small Object Detectioncited by 1

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