2024/01/16 by Haoran Zhu, Zhu, Haoran, Chang Xu +9 · 1 citation
Computer Science · Engineering · #Advanced Image and Video Retrieval Techniques #Advanced Neural Network Applications #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Remote-Sensing Image Classification
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2401.08056
openalex publication_date 2024/01/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Precise detection of tiny objects in remote sensing imagery remains a significant challenge due to their limited visual information and frequent occurrence within scenes. This challenge is further exacerbated by the practical burden and inherent errors associated with manual annotation: annotating tiny objects is laborious and prone to errors (i.e., label noise). Training detectors for such objects using noisy labels often leads to suboptimal performance, with networks tending to overfit on noisy labels. In this study, we address the intricate issue of tiny object detection under noisy label supervision. We systematically investigate the impact of various types of noise on network training, revealing the vulnerability of object detectors to class shifts and inaccurate bounding boxes for tiny objects. To mitigate these challenges, we propose a DeNoising Tiny Object Detector (DN-TOD), which incorporates a Class-aware Label Correction (CLC) scheme to address class shifts and a Trend-guided Learning Strategy (TLS) to handle bounding box noise. CLC mitigates inaccurate class supervision by identifying and filtering out class-shifted positive samples, while TLS reduces noisy box-induced erroneous supervision through sample reweighting and bounding box regeneration. Additionally, Our method can be seamlessly integrated into both one-stage and two-stage object detection pipelines. Comprehensive experiments conducted on synthetic (i.e., noisy AI-TOD-v2.0 and DOTA-v2.0) and real-world (i.e., AI-TOD) noisy datasets demonstrate the robustness of DN-TOD under various types of label noise. Notably, when applied to the strong baseline RFLA, DN-TOD exhibits a noteworthy performance improvement of 4.9 points under 40% mixed noise. Datasets, codes, and models will be made publicly available.