Dot Distance for Tiny Object Detection in Aerial Images

Object detection has achieved great progress with the development of anchor-based and anchor-free detectors. However, the detection of tiny objects is still challenging due to the lack of appearance information. In this paper, we observe that Intersection over Union (IoU), the most widely used metric in object detection, is sensitive to slight offsets between predicted bounding boxes and ground truths when detecting tiny objects. Although some new metrics such as GIoU, DIoU and CIoU are proposed, their performance on tiny object detection is still below the expected level by a large margin. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective new metric called Dot Distance (DotD) for tiny object detection where DotD is defined as normalized Euclidean distance between the center points of two bounding boxes. Extensive experiments on tiny object detection dataset show that anchor-based detectors’ performance is highly improved over their baselines with the application of DotD.