Visual object detection has achieved unprecedented advance with the rise of deep convolutional neural networks. However, detecting tiny objects (for example tiny persons less than 20 pixels) in large-scale images remains not well investigated. The extremely small objects raise a grand challenge about feature representation while the massive and complex backgrounds aggregate the risk of false alarms. In this paper, we introduce a new benchmark, referred to as TinyPerson, opening up a promising direction for tiny object detection in a long distance and with massive backgrounds. We experimentally find that the scale mismatch between the dataset for network pre-training and the dataset for detector learning could deteriorate the feature representation and the detectors. Accordingly, we propose a simple yet effective Scale Match approach to align the object scales between the two datasets for favorable tinyobject representation. Experiments show the significant performance gain of our proposed approach over state-ofthe-art detectors, and the challenging aspects of TinyPerson related to real-world scenarios. The TinyPerson benchmark and the code for our approach will be publicly available 1 .
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.