Learning to Borrow Features for Improved Detection of Small Objects in Single-Shot Detectors

Abstract: Detecting small objects remains a significant challenge in single-shot object detectors due to the inherent trade-off between spatial resolution and semantic richness in convolutional feature maps. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework that enables small object representations to "borrow" discriminative features from larger, semantically richer instances within the same class. Our architecture introduces three key components: the Feature Matching Block (FMB) to identify semantically similar descriptors across layers, the Feature Representing Block (FRB) to generate enhanced shallow features through weighted aggregation, and the Feature Fusion Block (FFB) to refine feature maps by integrating original, borrowed, and context information. Built upon the SSD framework, our method improves the descriptive capacity of shallow layers while maintaining real-time detection performance. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly boosts small object detection accuracy over baseline methods, offering a promising direction for robust object detection in complex visual environments.