LSOD-DETR: a lightweight small object detection model based on real-time detection transformer
摘要
This paper introduces LSOD-DETR, a lightweight small object detection model based on the real-time detection transformer, designed to address the challenges of low pixel counts and indistinct features in unmanned scenes. To enhance multi-scale feature perception, we design a multi-scale edge information enhancement (MSEIE) module that combines learnable edge extraction with convolution operations. Additionally, a small object detection feature enhancement network (SDENet) is proposed to strengthen the detection of tiny targets by fusing shallow details. Furthermore, a knowledge distillation method is introduced to optimize the trade-off between performance and complexity. Experimental results on the Tsinghua-Tencent 100K dataset demonstrate its superiority, achieving a precision of 91.6%, recall of 86.7%, and mAP (0.5) of 88.9%. Significantly, the model demonstrates exceptional efficiency suitable for real-time edge deployment, operating with only 14.1 million parameters and 44.3 GFLOPs, while achieving an inference speed of 65 FPS. Generalization tests on the VisDrone dataset further validate its robustness, with mAP (0.5) reaching 40.3%.