# Enhancing Object Detection Performance for Small Objects through Synthetic Data Generation and Proportional Class-Balancing Technique: A Comparative Study in Industrial Scenarios

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.12729 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12729/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Jan 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [YOLOv4: Optimal Speed and Accuracy of Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10934/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO Captions: Data Collection and Evaluation Server](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.00325/) (2015)
- [Alias-Free Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12423/) (2021)
- [An Introduction to Variational Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02691/) (2019)
- [YOLOv7: Trainable bag-of-freebies sets new state-of-the-art for real-time object detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02696/) (2022)
- [Training Deep Networks with Synthetic Data: Bridging the Reality Gap by Domain Randomization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06516/) (2018)
- [OverFeat: Integrated Recognition, Localization and Detection using Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6229/) (2013)
- [Instance-aware Semantic Segmentation via Multi-task Network Cascades](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04412/) (2015)
- [Deep Convolutional Neural Networks and Data Augmentation for Environmental Sound Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.04363/) (2016)
- [T-CNN: Tubelets with Convolutional Neural Networks for Object Detection from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.02532/) (2016)
- [Going Deeper into Action Recognition: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.04988/) (2016)
- [Unity Perception: Generate Synthetic Data for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.04259/) (2021)
- [Leveraging Synthetic Data in Object Detection on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12252/) (2021)
- [DepthSynth: Real-Time Realistic Synthetic Data Generation from CAD Models for 2.5D Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08558/) (2017)
- [YOLO-Z: Improving small object detection in YOLOv5 for autonomous vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11798/) (2021)
- [Object Detection Using Deep CNNs Trained on Synthetic Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.06782/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Enhancing Object Detection with Hybrid dataset in Manufacturing Environments: Comparing Federated Learning to Conventional Techniques](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08974/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Object Detection (OD) has proven to be a significant computer vision method in extracting localized class information and has multiple applications in the industry. Although many of the state-of-the-art (SOTA) OD models perform well on medium and large sized objects, they seem to under perform on small objects. In most of the industrial use cases, it is difficult to collect and annotate data for small objects, as it is time-consuming and prone to human errors. Additionally, those datasets are likely to be unbalanced and often result in an inefficient model convergence. To tackle this challenge, this study presents a novel approach that injects additional data points to improve the performance of the OD models. Using synthetic data generation, the difficulties in data collection and annotations for small object data points can be minimized and to create a dataset with balanced distribution. This paper discusses the effects of a simple proportional class-balancing technique, to enable better anchor matching of the OD models. A comparison was carried out on the performances of the SOTA OD models: YOLOv5, YOLOv7 and SSD, for combinations of real and synthetic datasets within an industrial use case.