MineSDS: A Unified Framework for Small Object Detection and Drivable Area Segmentation for Open-Pit Mining Scenario

To tackle the challenges posed by dense small objects and fuzzy boundaries on unstructured roads in the mining scenario, we proposed an end-to-end small object detection and drivable area segmentation framework for open-pit mining. We employed a convolutional network backbone as a feature extractor for both two tasks, as multi-task learning yielded promising results in autonomous driving perception. To address small object detection, we introduced a lightweight attention module that allowed our network to focus more on the spatial and channel dimensions of small objects without impeding inference time. We also used a convolutional block attention module in the drivable area segmentation subnetwork, which assigned more weight to road boundaries to improve feature mapping capabilities. Furthermore, to improve our network perception accuracy of both tasks, we used weighted summation when designing the loss function. We validated the effectiveness of our approach by testing it on pre-collected mining data which were called Minescape. Our detection results on the Minescape dataset showed 87.8% mAP index, which was 9.3% higher than state-of-the-art algorithms. Our segmentation results surpassed the comparison algorithm by 1 percent in MIoU index. Our experimental results demonstrated that our approach achieves competitive performance.