Papers › MVA2023 Small Object Detection Challenge for Spotting Birds: Dataset, Methods, and Results
MVA2023 Small Object Detection Challenge for Spotting Birds: Dataset, Methods, and Results
Yuki Kondo, Norimichi Ukita, Takayuki Yamaguchi, Hao-Yu Hou, Mu-Yi Shen, Chia-Chi Hsu, En-Ming Huang, Yu-Chen Huang, Yu-Cheng Xia, Chien-Yao Wang, Chun-Yi Lee, Da Huo, Marc A. Kastner, TingWei Liu, Yasutomo Kawanishi, Takatsugu Hirayama, Takahiro Komamizu, Ichiro Ide, Yosuke Shinya, Xinyao Liu, Guang Liang, Syusuke Yasui
Small Object Detection (SOD) is an important machine vision topic because (i) a variety of real-world applications require object detection for distant objects and (ii) SOD is a challenging task due to the noisy, blurred, and less-informative image appearances of small objects. This paper proposes a new SOD dataset consisting of 39,070 images including 137,121 bird instances, which is called the Small Object Detection for Spotting Birds (SOD4SB) dataset. The detail of the challenge with the SOD4SB dataset is introduced in this paper. In total, 223 participants joined this challenge. This paper briefly introduces the award-winning methods. The dataset, the baseline code, and the website for evaluation on the public testset are publicly available.
Code
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Tasks
Datasets
Introduced by this paper, per the archive.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Small Object Detection | SOD4SB Private Test | DL method (YOLOv8 + Ensamble) | AP50 | 22.9 | #3 of 5 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Small Object Detection | SOD4SB Private Test | E2 method (Normalized Gaussian Wasserstein Distance + Switch Hard Augmentation + Multi scale train + Weight Moving Average + CenterNet + VarifocalNet) | AP50 | 22.1 | #5 of 5 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Small Object Detection | SOD4SB Public Test | DL method (YOLOv8 + Ensamble) | AP50 | 73.1 | #3 of 5 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Small Object Detection | SOD4SB Public Test | E2 method (Normalized Gaussian Wasserstein Distance + Switch Hard Augmentation + Multi scale train + Weight Moving Average + CenterNet + VarifocalNet) | AP50 | 69.6 | #5 of 5 | Archive leaderboard | report |
Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.
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