Select-Mosaic: Data Augmentation Method for Dense Small Object Scenes

Abstract: Data augmentation refers to the process of applying a series of transformations or expansions to original data to generate new samples, thereby increasing the diversity and quantity of the data, effectively improving the performance and robustness of models. As a common data augmentation method, Mosaic data augmentation technique stitches multiple images together to increase the diversity and complexity of training data, thereby reducing the risk of overfitting. Although Mosaic data augmentation achieves excellent results in general detection tasks by stitching images together, it still has certain limitations for specific detection tasks. This paper addresses the challenge of detecting a large number of densely distributed small objects in aerial images by proposing the Select-Mosaic data augmentation method, which is improved with a fine-grained region selection strategy. The improved Select-Mosaic method demonstrates superior performance in handling dense small object detection tasks, significantly enhancing the accuracy and stability of detection models. Code is available at https://github.com/malagoutou/Select-Mosaic.