Small Object Detection Method Based on Weighted Feature Fusion and CSMA Attention Module

Abstract

Small object detection is one of the challenging tasks in computer vision. Most of the existing small object detection models cannot fully extract the characteristics of small objects within an image, due to the small coverage area, low resolution and unclear detailed information of small objects in the image; hence, the effect of these models is not ideal. To solve this problem, a simple and efficient reinforce feature pyramid network R-FPN is proposed for the YOLOv5 algorithm. The learnable weight is introduced to show the importance of different input features, make full use of the useful information of different feature layers and strengthen the extraction of small object features. At the same time, a channel space mixed attention CSMA module is proposed to extract the detailed information of small objects combined with spaces and channels, suppress other useless information and further improve the accuracy of small object detection. The experimental results show that the proposed method improves the average accuracy AP, AP50 and AR100 of the original algorithm by 2.11%, 2.86% and 1.94%, respectively, and the detection effect is better than the existing small object detection algorithms, which proves the effectiveness of the proposed method.