SODNet: small object detection using deconvolutional neural network

Convolution neural network (CNN) is an efficient technique to detect objects in various kinds of images, especially for microaneurysm (MA) of diabetic retinopathy in retinal fundus image. This study proposes a deconvolutional neural network to accurately discriminate MA from non-MA. The deconvolution, instead of pooling operation, is embedded into the CNN to recover the erased details of feature maps of convolutional layers. Three types of images are collected for training and predicting. Furthermore, the extracted features are fed into the fully-connected layers to classify using a softmax layer. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve significant sensitivity and accuracy on multiple public datasets, in comparison to the state-of-the-art. For Retinopathy Online Challenge dataset, the sensitivity and accuracy are improved up to 0.798 and 0.986, respectively.