Enhanced Detection of Tiny Objects in Aerial Images

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Kim, Kihyun, Lazarou, Michalis, Stathaki, Tania
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866918318406893568
author Kim, Kihyun
Lazarou, Michalis
Stathaki, Tania
author_facet Kim, Kihyun
Lazarou, Michalis
Stathaki, Tania
contents While one-stage detectors like YOLOv8 offer fast training speed, they often under-perform on detecting small objects as a trade-off. This becomes even more critical when detecting tiny objects in aerial imagery due to low-resolution targets and cluttered backgrounds. To address this, we introduce four enhancement strategies-input image resolution adjustment, data augmentation, attention mechanisms, and an alternative gating function for attention modules-that can be easily implemented on YOLOv8. We demonstrate that image size enlargement and the proper use of augmentation can lead to enhancement. Additionally, we designed a Mixture of Orthogonal Neural-modules Network (MoonNet) pipeline which consists of multiple attention-module-augmented CNNs. Two well-known attention modules, Squeeze-and-Excitation (SE) Block and Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM), were integrated into the backbone of YOLOv8 to form the MoonNet design, and the MoonNet backbone obtained improved detection accuracy compared to the original YOLOv8 backbone and single-type attention-module-augmented backbones. MoonNet further proved its adaptability and potential by achieving state-of-the-art performance on a tiny-object benchmark when integrated with the YOLC model. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Kihyun11/MoonNet
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_17078
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Enhanced Detection of Tiny Objects in Aerial Images
Kim, Kihyun
Lazarou, Michalis
Stathaki, Tania
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
While one-stage detectors like YOLOv8 offer fast training speed, they often under-perform on detecting small objects as a trade-off. This becomes even more critical when detecting tiny objects in aerial imagery due to low-resolution targets and cluttered backgrounds. To address this, we introduce four enhancement strategies-input image resolution adjustment, data augmentation, attention mechanisms, and an alternative gating function for attention modules-that can be easily implemented on YOLOv8. We demonstrate that image size enlargement and the proper use of augmentation can lead to enhancement. Additionally, we designed a Mixture of Orthogonal Neural-modules Network (MoonNet) pipeline which consists of multiple attention-module-augmented CNNs. Two well-known attention modules, Squeeze-and-Excitation (SE) Block and Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM), were integrated into the backbone of YOLOv8 to form the MoonNet design, and the MoonNet backbone obtained improved detection accuracy compared to the original YOLOv8 backbone and single-type attention-module-augmented backbones. MoonNet further proved its adaptability and potential by achieving state-of-the-art performance on a tiny-object benchmark when integrated with the YOLC model. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Kihyun11/MoonNet
title Enhanced Detection of Tiny Objects in Aerial Images
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.17078