Enhanced Detection of Tiny Objects in Aerial Images

While one-stage detectors like YOLOv8 offer fast training speed, they often under-perform on detecting small objects as a trade-off. This becomes even more critical when detecting tiny objects in aerial imagery due to low-resolution targets and cluttered backgrounds. To address this, we introduce three enhancement strategies -- input image resolution adjustment, data augmentation, and attention mechanisms -- that can be easily implemented on YOLOv8. We demonstrate that image size enlargement and the proper use of augmentation can lead to enhancement. Additionally, we designed a Mixture of Orthogonal Neural-modules Network (MoonNet) pipeline which consists of attention-augmented CNNs. Two well-known attention modules, the Squeeze-and-Excitation Block (SE Block) and the Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM), were integrated into the backbone of YOLOv8 with an increased number of channels, and the MoonNet backbone obtained improved detection accuracy compared to the original YOLOv8. MoonNet further proved its adaptability and potential by achieving state-of-the-art performance on a tiny-object benchmark when integrated with the YOLC model. Our codes are available at: https://github.com/Kihyun11/MoonNet