论文标题
检测航空图像中的微小物体：标准化的瓦斯汀距离和新的基准测试
Detecting tiny objects in aerial images: A normalized Wasserstein distance and a new benchmark
论文作者
论文摘要
航空图像中的微小对象检测（TOD）具有挑战性，因为一个小物体仅包含几个像素。最先进的对象探测器由于缺乏判别特征的监督而无法为微小对象提供令人满意的结果。我们的主要观察结果是，与联合度量的交集及其扩展对微小物体的位置偏差非常敏感，这在基于锚固的探测器中使用时会大大恶化标签分配的质量。为了解决这个问题，我们提出了一种新的评估度量标准，称为标准化的Wasserstein距离（NWD）和基于排名的新分配（RKA）策略，以进行微小对象检测。提出的NWD-RKA策略可以轻松地嵌入到各种基于锚的探测器中，以替代标准的基于IOU阈值的检测器，从而大大改善了标签分配并为网络培训提供了足够的监督信息。 NWD-RKA在四个数据集上进行了测试，可以始终如一地提高微小的对象检测性能。此外，在空中图像（AI-TOD）数据集中观察到微小对象检测中的突出嘈杂标签，我们有动力将其重新标记并释放AI-TOD-V2及其相应的基准。在AI-TOD-V2中，丢失的注释和位置错误问题会大大减轻，从而促进了更可靠的培训和验证过程。将NWD-RKA嵌入探测器中，检测性能比AI-TOD-V2上的最先进竞争对手提高了4.3个AP点。数据集，代码和更多可视化可在以下网址提供：https：//chasel-tsui.github.io/ai/ai-tod-v2/
Tiny object detection (TOD) in aerial images is challenging since a tiny object only contains a few pixels. State-of-the-art object detectors do not provide satisfactory results on tiny objects due to the lack of supervision from discriminative features. Our key observation is that the Intersection over Union (IoU) metric and its extensions are very sensitive to the location deviation of the tiny objects, which drastically deteriorates the quality of label assignment when used in anchor-based detectors. To tackle this problem, we propose a new evaluation metric dubbed Normalized Wasserstein Distance (NWD) and a new RanKing-based Assigning (RKA) strategy for tiny object detection. The proposed NWD-RKA strategy can be easily embedded into all kinds of anchor-based detectors to replace the standard IoU threshold-based one, significantly improving label assignment and providing sufficient supervision information for network training. Tested on four datasets, NWD-RKA can consistently improve tiny object detection performance by a large margin. Besides, observing prominent noisy labels in the Tiny Object Detection in Aerial Images (AI-TOD) dataset, we are motivated to meticulously relabel it and release AI-TOD-v2 and its corresponding benchmark. In AI-TOD-v2, the missing annotation and location error problems are considerably mitigated, facilitating more reliable training and validation processes. Embedding NWD-RKA into DetectoRS, the detection performance achieves 4.3 AP points improvement over state-of-the-art competitors on AI-TOD-v2. Datasets, codes, and more visualizations are available at: https://chasel-tsui.github.io/AI-TOD-v2/
