Texture and semantic integrated small objects detection in foggy scenes

In recent years, small objects detection has received extensive attention from scholars for its important value in application. Some effective methods for small objects detection have been proposed. However, the data collected in real scenes are often foggy images, so the models trained with these methods are difficult to extract discriminative object features from such images. In addition, the existing small objects detection algorithms ignore the texture information and high-level semantic information of tiny objects, which limits the improvement of detection performance. Aiming at the above problems, this paper proposes a texture and semantic integrated small objects detection in foggy scenes. The algorithm focuses on extracting discriminative features unaffected by the environment, and obtaining texture information and high-level semantic information of small objects. Specifically, considering the adverse impact of foggy images on recognition performance, a knowledge guidance module is designed, and the discriminative features extracted from clear images by the model are used to guide the network to learn foggy images. Second, the features of high-resolution images and low-resolution images are extracted, and the adversarial learning method is adopted to train the model to give the network the ability to obtain the texture information of tiny objects from low-resolution images. Finally, an attention mechanism is constructed between feature maps of the same scale and different scales to further enrich the high-level semantic information of small objects. A large number of experiments have been conducted on data sets such as “Cityscape to Foggy” and “CoCo”. The mean prediction accuracy (mAP) has reached 46.2% on “Cityscape to Fogg”, and 33.3% on “CoCo”, which fully proves the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method.