SET: Spectral Enhancement for Tiny Object Detection

Deep learning has significantly advanced the object detection field. However, tiny object detection (TOD) remains a challenging problem. We provide a new analysis method to examine the TOD challenge through occlusion-based attribution analysis in the frequency domain. We observe that tiny objects become less distinct after feature encoding and can benefit from the removal of high-frequency information. In this paper, we propose a novel approach named Spectral Enhancement for Tiny object detection (SET), which amplifies the frequency signatures of tiny objects in a heterogeneous architecture. SET includes two modules. The Hierarchical Background Smoothing (HBS) module suppresses high-frequency noise in the background through adaptive smoothing operations. The Adversarial Perturbation Injection (API) module leverages adversarial perturbations to increase feature saliency in critical regions and prompt the refinement of object features during training. Extensive experiments on four datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Especially, SET boosts the prior art RFLA by 3.2% AP on the AI-TOD dataset.