Improved detection of small objects in road network sequences

The vast number of existing IP cameras in current road networks is an opportunity to take advantage of the captured data and analyze the video and detect any significant events. For this purpose, it is necessary to detect moving vehicles, a task that was carried out using classical artificial vision techniques until a few years ago. Nowadays, significant improvements have been obtained by deep learning networks. Still, object detection is considered one of the leading open issues within computer vision. The current scenario is constantly evolving, and new models and techniques are appearing trying to improve this field. In particular, new problems and drawbacks appear regarding detecting small objects, which correspond mainly to the vehicles that appear in the road scenes. All this means that new solutions that try to improve the low detection rate of small elements are essential. Among the different emerging research lines, this work focuses on the detection of small objects. In particular, our proposal aims to vehicle detection from images captured by video surveillance cameras. In this work, we propose a new procedure for detecting small-scale objects by applying super-resolution processes based on detections performed by convolutional neural networks (CNN). The neural network is integrated with processes that are in charge of increasing the resolution of the images to improve the object detection performance. This solution has been tested for a set of traffic images containing elements of different scales to test the efficiency according to the detections obtained by the model, thus demonstrating that our proposal achieves good results in a wide range of situations.