# A Guide to Image and Video based Small Object Detection using Deep Learning : Case Study of Maritime Surveillance

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.12926 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12926/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 140 of its 313 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Jul 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 140)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05431/) (2016)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [Visualizing and Understanding Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2901/) (2013)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [Searching for MobileNetV3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02244/) (2019)
- [YOLOv4: Optimal Speed and Accuracy of Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10934/) (2020)
- [Improved Regularization of Convolutional Neural Networks with Cutout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04552/) (2017)
- [FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01355/) (2019)
- [Deformable Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06211/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [1st Workshop on Maritime Computer Vision (MaCVi) 2023: Challenge Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13508/) (2022)
- [Transformers in Small Object Detection: A Benchmark and Survey of State-of-the-Art](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.04902/) (2023)
- [MVA2023 Small Object Detection Challenge for Spotting Birds: Dataset, Methods, and Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09143/) (2023)
- [Faster Image2Video Generation: A Closer Look at CLIP Image Embedding's Impact on Spatio-Temporal Cross-Attentions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19205/) (2024)
- [HART: High-Resolution Annotation-Free Reasoning Technique through a Closed-loop Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.23615/) (2026)
- [MVQA-68K: A Multi-dimensional and Causally-annotated Dataset with Quality Interpretability for Video Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.11589/) (2025)
- [Deep Learning-Based Object Detection in Maritime Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Imagery: Review and Experimental Comparisons](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07955/) (2023)
- [MVTD: A Benchmark Dataset for Maritime Visual Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02866/) (2025)
- [WUTDet: A 100K-Scale Ship Detection Dataset and Benchmarks with Dense Small Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.07759/) (2026)
- [WD-FQDet: Multispectral Detection Transformer via Wavelet Decomposition and Frequency-aware Query Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.13621/) (2026)
- [An Empirical Study of Methods for Small Object Detection from Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.03674/) (2025)
- [LSFDNet: A Single-Stage Fusion and Detection Network for Ships Using SWIR and LWIR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20574/) (2025)
- [GSO-Net: Visual State Machines for Hazardous Freight Transfer Compliance at Petrochemical Logistics Nodes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.12408/) (2026)
- [C2FXNet: Coarse-to-Fine Scene Expert for Unified Object Detection across Adverse Weather](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.25693/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Small object detection (SOD) in optical images and videos is a challenging problem that even state-of-the-art generic object detection methods fail to accurately localize and identify such objects. Typically, small objects appear in real-world due to large camera-object distance. Because small objects occupy only a small area in the input image (e.g., less than 10%), the information extracted from such a small area is not always rich enough to support decision making. Multidisciplinary strategies are being developed by researchers working at the interface of deep learning and computer vision to enhance the performance of SOD deep learning based methods. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of over 160 research papers published between 2017 and 2022 in order to survey this growing subject. This paper summarizes the existing literature and provide a taxonomy that illustrates the broad picture of current research. We investigate how to improve the performance of small object detection in maritime environments, where increasing performance is critical. By establishing a connection between generic and maritime SOD research, future directions have been identified. In addition, the popular datasets that have been used for SOD for generic and maritime applications are discussed, and also well-known evaluation metrics for the state-of-the-art methods on some of the datasets are provided.