Rethinking PASCAL-VOC and MS-COCO dataset for small object detection

The data and the algorithm are critical to deep learning-based small object detectors. In this paper, we rethink the PASCAL-VOC and MS-COCO dataset for small object detection. By visual analysis of the original annotations, we find that there are different labeling errors in these two datasets. To solve these problems, we build specific datasets, including SDOD, Mini6K, Mini2022 and Mini6KClean. The experimental results of several typical al-gorithms (e.g. SSD, YOLOv5, Faster RCNN and Deformable DETR) on the datasets show that data labeling errors (such as missing labels, category label errors, inappropriate labels) are another factor that affects the detection performance of small objects.