Scale-Aware Relay and Scale-Adaptive Loss for Tiny Object Detection in Aerial Images

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Li, Jinfu, Huang, Yuqi, Song, Hong, Wang, Ting, Xia, Jianghan, Lin, Yucong, Fan, Jingfan, Yang, Jian
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Li, Jinfu
Huang, Yuqi
Song, Hong
Wang, Ting
Xia, Jianghan
Lin, Yucong
Fan, Jingfan
Yang, Jian
author_facet Li, Jinfu
Huang, Yuqi
Song, Hong
Wang, Ting
Xia, Jianghan
Lin, Yucong
Fan, Jingfan
Yang, Jian
contents Recently, despite the remarkable advancements in object detection, modern detectors still struggle to detect tiny objects in aerial images. One key reason is that tiny objects carry limited features that are inevitably degraded or lost during long-distance network propagation. Another is that smaller objects receive disproportionately greater regression penalties than larger ones during training. To tackle these issues, we propose a Scale-Aware Relay Layer (SARL) and a Scale-Adaptive Loss (SAL) for tiny object detection, both of which are seamlessly compatible with the top-performing frameworks. Specifically, SARL employs a cross-scale spatial-channel attention to progressively enrich the meaningful features of each layer and strengthen the cross-layer feature sharing. SAL reshapes the vanilla IoU-based losses so as to dynamically assign lower weights to larger objects. This loss is able to focus training on tiny objects while reducing the influence on large objects. Extensive experiments are conducted on three benchmarks (\textit{i.e.,} AI-TOD, DOTA-v2.0 and VisDrone2019), and the results demonstrate that the proposed method boosts the generalization ability by 5.5\% Average Precision (AP) when embedded in YOLOv5 (anchor-based) and YOLOx (anchor-free) baselines. Moreover, it also promotes the robust performance with 29.0\% AP on the real-world noisy dataset (\textit{i.e.,} AI-TOD-v2.0).
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_09891
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Scale-Aware Relay and Scale-Adaptive Loss for Tiny Object Detection in Aerial Images
Li, Jinfu
Huang, Yuqi
Song, Hong
Wang, Ting
Xia, Jianghan
Lin, Yucong
Fan, Jingfan
Yang, Jian
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Recently, despite the remarkable advancements in object detection, modern detectors still struggle to detect tiny objects in aerial images. One key reason is that tiny objects carry limited features that are inevitably degraded or lost during long-distance network propagation. Another is that smaller objects receive disproportionately greater regression penalties than larger ones during training. To tackle these issues, we propose a Scale-Aware Relay Layer (SARL) and a Scale-Adaptive Loss (SAL) for tiny object detection, both of which are seamlessly compatible with the top-performing frameworks. Specifically, SARL employs a cross-scale spatial-channel attention to progressively enrich the meaningful features of each layer and strengthen the cross-layer feature sharing. SAL reshapes the vanilla IoU-based losses so as to dynamically assign lower weights to larger objects. This loss is able to focus training on tiny objects while reducing the influence on large objects. Extensive experiments are conducted on three benchmarks (\textit{i.e.,} AI-TOD, DOTA-v2.0 and VisDrone2019), and the results demonstrate that the proposed method boosts the generalization ability by 5.5\% Average Precision (AP) when embedded in YOLOv5 (anchor-based) and YOLOx (anchor-free) baselines. Moreover, it also promotes the robust performance with 29.0\% AP on the real-world noisy dataset (\textit{i.e.,} AI-TOD-v2.0).
title Scale-Aware Relay and Scale-Adaptive Loss for Tiny Object Detection in Aerial Images
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09891