MSFE-PANet: Improved YOLOv4-based Small Object Detection Method in Complex Scenes

With the rapid development of computer vision and artificial intelligence technology, visual object detection has made unprecedented progress, and small object detection in complex scenes has attracted more and more attention. To solve the problems of ambiguity, overlap and occlusion in small object detection in complex scenes. In this paper, a multi-scale fusion feature enhanced path aggregation network MSFE-PANet is proposed. By adding attention mechanism and feature fusion, the fusion of strong positioning information of deep feature map and strong semantic information of shallow feature map is enhanced, which helps the network to find interesting areas in complex scenes and improve its sensitivity to small objects. The rejection loss function and network prediction scale are designed to solve the problems of missing detection and false detection of overlapping and blocking small objects in complex backgrounds. The proposed method achieves an accuracy of 40.7% on the VisDrone2021 dataset and 89.7% on the PASCAL VOC dataset. Comparative analysis with mainstream object detection algorithms proves the superiority of this method in detecting small objects in complex scenes.