# Visible-Thermal Tiny Object Detection: A Benchmark Dataset and Baselines

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.14482 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14482/

## Key facts

- Cited by 27 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 46 of its 69 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01355/) (2019)
- [MMDetection: Open MMLab Detection Toolbox and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07155/) (2019)
- [Generalized Intersection over Union: A Metric and A Loss for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09630/) (2019)
- [Cascade R-CNN: Delving into High Quality Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00726/) (2017)
- [Objects as Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07850/) (2019)
- [Bridging the Gap Between Anchor-based and Anchor-free Detection via Adaptive Training Sample Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02424/) (2019)
- [Sparse R-CNN: End-to-End Object Detection with Learnable Proposals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12450/) (2020)
- [Distance-IoU Loss: Faster and Better Learning for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08287/) (2019)
- [WIDER FACE: A Face Detection Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06523/) (2015)
- [Detection and Tracking Meet Drones Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06303/) (2020)
- [VarifocalNet: An IoU-aware Dense Object Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.13367/) (2020)
- [LLVIP: A Visible-infrared Paired Dataset for Low-light Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10831/) (2021)
- [TOOD: Task-aligned One-stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07755/) (2021)
- [Object Detection in Aerial Images: A Large-Scale Benchmark and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12219/) (2021)
- [Drone-based RGB-Infrared Cross-Modality Vehicle Detection via Uncertainty-Aware Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.02437/) (2020)
- [Asymmetric Contextual Modulation for Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14530/) (2020)
- [Dense Nested Attention Network for Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00487/) (2021)
- [Towards Large-Scale Small Object Detection: Survey and Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14096/) (2022)
- [RGB-T Object Tracking:Benchmark and Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08982/) (2018)
- [Attentional Local Contrast Networks for Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.08573/) (2020)
- [Slicing Aided Hyper Inference and Fine-tuning for Small Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06934/) (2022)
- [Dynamic R-CNN: Towards High Quality Object Detection via Dynamic Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06002/) (2020)
- [LasHeR: A Large-scale High-diversity Benchmark for RGBT Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13202/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Pinwheel-shaped Convolution and Scale-based Dynamic Loss for Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16986/) (2024)
- [Event-based Tiny Object Detection: A Benchmark Dataset and Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23575/) (2025)
- [ATRNet-STAR: A Large Dataset and Benchmark Towards Remote Sensing Object Recognition in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13354/) (2025)
- [RPCANet++: Deep Interpretable Robust PCA for Sparse Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04190/) (2025)
- [Securing the Skies: A Comprehensive Survey on Anti-UAV Methods, Benchmarking, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11967/) (2025)
- [Probing Deep into Temporal Profile Makes the Infrared Small Target Detector Much Better](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12766/) (2025)
- [Infrared Small Target Detection in Satellite Videos: A New Dataset and A Novel Recurrent Feature Refinement Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12448/) (2024)
- [Towards Robust Infrared Small Target Detection: A Feature-Enhanced and Sensitivity-Tunable Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.20090/) (2024)
- [M-SpecGene: Generalized Foundation Model for RGBT Multispectral Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16318/) (2025)
- [XS-VID: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Small Object Detection and Tracking in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18137/) (2024)
- [vSTMD: Visual Motion Detection for Extremely Tiny Target at Various Velocities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13054/) (2025)
- [ATR-UMMIM: A Benchmark Dataset for UAV-Based Multimodal Image Registration under Complex Imaging Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20764/) (2025)
- [Benchmarking EfficientTAM on FMO datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.06536/) (2025)
- [Beyond Motion Cues and Structural Sparsity: Revisiting Small Moving Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.07654/) (2025)
- [Generalized Small Object Detection:A Point-Prompted Paradigm and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02773/) (2026)
- [Na-IRSTD: Enhancing Infrared Small Target Detection via Native-Resolution Feature Selection and Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.05804/) (2026)
- [GAAT: Geometry-Aware Alignment Transformer for Multimodal UAV Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.27971/) (2026)
- [LSP-ST: Ladder Shape-Biased Side-Tuning for Robust Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14481/) (2025)
- [Small Object Detection in Complex Backgrounds with Multi-Scale Attention and Global Relation Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.03788/) (2026)
- [MI-DETR: A Strong Baseline for Moving Infrared Small Target Detection with Motion Integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.05071/) (2026)
- [UAV-CB: A Complex-Background RGB-T Dataset and Local Frequency Bridge Network for UAV Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.17492/) (2026)
- [LER-YOLO: Reliability-Aware Expert Routing for Misaligned RGB-Infrared UAV Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.20667/) (2026)
- [Towards UAV Detection in the Real World: A New Multispectral Dataset UAVNet-MS and a New Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.20963/) (2026)
- [SkyEV: RGB-Event UAV detection and tracking dataset and baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.18747/) (2026)
- [MITE-Net: SWaP-Optimized 4K Video Tiny Target Perception for Embodied Edge SAR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.15830/) (2026)
- [Aligned Radiometric RGB-Thermal Fusion for UAV Facade Anomaly Screening](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.12521/) (2026)
- [PointEvent: Rethinking Event-based Tiny Object Detection via Serialized Motion Evidence Accumulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.20066/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Small object detection (SOD) has been a longstanding yet challenging task for decades, with numerous datasets and algorithms being developed. However, they mainly focus on either visible or thermal modality, while visible-thermal (RGBT) bimodality is rarely explored. Although some RGBT datasets have been developed recently, the insufficient quantity, limited category, misaligned images and large target size cannot provide an impartial benchmark to evaluate multi-category visible-thermal small object detection (RGBT SOD) algorithms. In this paper, we build the first large-scale benchmark with high diversity for RGBT SOD (namely RGBT-Tiny), including 115 paired sequences, 93K frames and 1.2M manual annotations. RGBT-Tiny contains abundant targets (7 categories) and high-diversity scenes (8 types that cover different illumination and density variations). Note that, over 81% of targets are smaller than 16x16, and we provide paired bounding box annotations with tracking ID to offer an extremely challenging benchmark with wide-range applications, such as RGBT fusion, detection and tracking. In addition, we propose a scale adaptive fitness (SAFit) measure that exhibits high robustness on both small and large targets. The proposed SAFit can provide reasonable performance evaluation and promote detection performance. Based on the proposed RGBT-Tiny dataset and SAFit measure, extensive evaluations have been conducted, including 23 recent state-of-the-art algorithms that cover four different types (i.e., visible generic detection, visible SOD, thermal SOD and RGBT object detection). Project is available at https://github.com/XinyiYing/RGBT-Tiny.