Composite Backbone Small Object Detection Based on Context and Multi-Scale Information with Attention Mechanism

Object detection has gained widespread application across various domains; nevertheless, small object detection still presents numerous challenges due to the inherent limitations of small objects, such as their limited resolution and susceptibility to interference from neighboring elements. To improve detection accuracy of small objects, this study presents a novel method that integrates context information, attention mechanism, and multi-scale information. First, to realize feature augmentation, a composite backbone network is employed which can jointly extract object features. On this basis, to efficiently incorporate context information and focus on key features, the composite dilated convolution and attention module (CDAM) is designed, consisting of a composite dilated convolution module (CDM) and convolutional block attention module (CBAM). Then, a feature elimination module (FEM) is introduced to reduce the feature proportion of medium and large objects on feature layers; the impact of neighboring objects on small object detection can thereby be mitigated. Experiments conducted on MS COCO validate the superior performance of the method compared with baseline detectors, while it yields an average enhancement of 0.8% in overall detection accuracy, with a notable enhancement of 2.7% in small object detection.