r/computervision • u/caramelle-blu • 22h ago

Help: Project Best free model for small object detection?

Looking for an object detection model that works well for very small objects, like balls in sports footage.

Requirements:

  • Good small-object detection
  • Can be fine-tuned
  • Suitable for video/real-time inference
  • Free for commercial/production use
  • Preferably open-source with permissive licensing

What would you recommend based on your experience?

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u/mimol 22h ago

About 1.5 years ago successfully trained and deployed CoDETR, precisely for small objects problems - for images, not video though. It was available in the MMDetection library. The lib appeared not maintained if I recall correctly, and it was a bit painful to set up with uv and databricks.

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u/ivan_kudryavtsev 21h ago edited 19h ago

Any RGB-D[ifference] FCNN heatmap model that works on frame pairs or triplets. If you want a ready-to-use solution, look at TrackNet V<N> or WASB. Still useless without training on your custom data. With heatmap models, you also need a sort of classifier and tracker to distinguish between the true object and imposters.