arXiv · 2512.07078
DFIR-DETR: Frequency-Domain Iterative Refinement and Dynamic Feature Aggregation for Small Object Detection
Abstract
Small object detection in complex scenes exposes a fundamental tension in neural network design: backbone attention distributes computation uniformly regardless of content, pyramid necks inflate activation magnitudes during upsampling without norm compensation, and bottleneck convolutions progressively smooth high-frequency edge components through accumulated spatial filtering. In response, we develop DFIR-DETR by tracing each proposed module back to a specific, measurable deficiency in the RT-DETR baseline: uniform attention that ignores spatial complexity, norm drift that destabilises upsampled features, and spatial convolutions that progressively suppress the high-frequency components small objects depend on. On NEU-DET and VisDrone, DFIR-DETR achieves 92.9% and 51.6% mAP50 with only 11.7M parameters and 47.2 GFLOPs, demonstrating consistent gains across two qualitatively different detection domains.
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Bo Gao, Jingcheng Tong, Xingsheng Chen, Han Yu, Zichen Li. 2025-12-08. DFIR-DETR: Frequency-Domain Iterative Refinement and Dynamic Feature Aggregation for Small Object Detection. https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.07078
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