The Visual Computer

https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-024-03284-8

RESEARCH

I-YOLO: a novel single-stage framework for small object detection

Kang Tong1 · Yiquan Wu1

Accepted: 20 January 2024

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2024

Abstract
Small object detection is a challenging task in computer vision. We claim that the huge performance gap between the small
object detectors and normal sized object detectors stems from two aspects, including the small object dataset and the small
object itself. In terms of datasets, we build a large-scale dataset with high image resolution dubbed Small-PCB, in order to
promote detection in semiconductor industry. For the small object itself, we utilize multi-scale feature learning and feature
fusion strategy to help detect objects. More concretely, we devise two novel components to predict small objects better:
re-parameterized module with channel shuffle (RMCS) and multi-scale feature enhanced convolution (MFEC). MFEC aims
to split input channels into several parts and applies convolutions with different sizes to each part, and adopt point-by-point
convolution to fuse individual channel features. RMCS not only use structural re-parameterization, but also channel shuffle.
The usage of channel shuffle can be seen as a fusion of channel features. It strengthens feature information interaction between
different channel groups, which bring more informative feature clues. Based on the RMCS and the MFEC, we introduce OIU-
RMCS and M-MFEC, respectively. Finally, we build our I-YOLO via integrating these two components into a YOLO-based
detector. A large number of qualitative and quantitative results in the experiments indicate that our proposed I-YOLO achieves
the state-of-the-art performance on the popular AI-TODv2 and Small-PCB datasets.

Keywords Small object detection · Channel shuffle · Multi-scale feature learning · Feature fusion · Small-PCB · YOLO

1 Introduction
Object detection [1–9] is an essential issue in computer
vision, which aims at discovering the location of instances
and providing their corresponding categories. As a sub-field
of object detection, small object detection focuses on predict-
ing those objects with small size. It enjoys great theoretical
and practical significance in remote sensing [10–12], surveil-
lance [13], defect detection [14, 15] in industrial scenarios,
etc. The research on small object detection [16–22] pro-
ceeds at a relatively slow pace, compared with generic object
detection. There remains a great detection performance gap
between normal sized object detectors and small object detec-
tors. We hold that this phenomenon originates from small
object dataset and small object itself.
B Yiquan Wu
nuaavision@163.com
1 College of Electronic and Information Engineering, Nanjing
University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing 211106,
China
For small object detection, there are few widely approved
datasets. Lots of researchers have to train and test their algo-
rithms on the subsets of large-scale datasets [23, 24] that
satisfy the definition of small objects. Although some detec-
tion datasets of small objects have been proposed [25–27],
these datasets are either small in scale (TinyPerson [27] only
with 1610 images), or only applicable to daily life (e.g. SOD
[26] and SDOD-MT [25]). In addition, existing industrial
datasets (such as Augmented PCB [28] and DeepPCB [29])
enjoy low spatial resolution, which would affect the detection
of small objects. To sum up, the currently available datasets
could not meet the training of small object detection model in
industrial scenarios. Thus, we construct a large-scale dataset
named Small-PCB to promote small object detection in semi-
conductor industry. As we all known, detecting small defects
at the early stages of this industry is crucial to improve yield
and save costs.
Small objects lack necessary information to distinguish
them from background or similar category. Therefore, learn-
ing proper representations from small objects is an extremely
hard task. To capture the features of small objects more

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Fig. 1 The framework of our improved YOLO detector (I-YOLO)
Fig. 2 The structure of OIU-RMCS. It mainly includes RMCS and RepVGG. As shown in RMCS, RepVGG and RepConv are adopted at the
training stage (a) and inference stage (b), respectively
efficiently, a series of works have been proposed, includ-
ing super-resolution scheme [30–33], optimization of loss
function [34–37], contextual clues [38–40], multi-scale fea-
ture learning [41–46] and feature fusion [47–49]. Super-
resolution scheme can recover high resolution from corre-
sponding low resolution features. Meanwhile, the generative
adversarial network (GAN) [50] can be employed to recon-
struct high-resolution images. GAN consists of generator
and discriminator, which contest with each other in a min-
imax optimization framework. Moreover, the loss function
plays an important role in good model training. Thus, small
object detection can benefit from the optimization of loss
function. Since small objects enjoy limited information, the
surrounding region of small objects can provide necessary
contextual clues to assist the detection of small objects.
In addition to the above three methods, multi-scale feature
learning and feature fusion are also significant means to
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K. Tong, Y. Wu
deal with small object detection. The former learns to cap-
ture features at multiple scales, while the latter uses some
strategies to fuse features. Both of these two approaches can
also facilitate small object detection. In this paper, we pro-
pose re-parameterized module with channel shuffle (RMCS)
and multi-scale feature enhanced convolution (MFEC). To
some extent, the MFEC and RMCS can be subordinate to
multi-scale feature learning and feature fusion. MFEC splits
input channels into several parts and applies convolutions
with different sizes to each part, and uses point-by-point
convolution to fuse individual channel features. Our RMCS
not only adopt structural re-parameterization (RepVGG and
RepConv are used in training and inference phase, respec-
tively), but also channel shuffle. The usage of channel shuffle
can strengthen feature information interaction between dif-
ferent channel groups, which bring more informative feature
information. This can be seen as a fusion of channel features.
I-YOLO: a novel single-stage framework for small object detection

Based on the RMCS and MFEC, we introduce One-time Inte-

gration Unit with RMCS (OIU-RMCS) and Module based on
MFEC (M-MFEC), respectively. Finally, we construct our
Improved YOLO (I-YOLO) object detector by integrating
these two components into a YOLO-based detector.
This paper offers main contributions as follows:

1. Design two novel components: re-parameterized mod-

ule with channel shuffle (RMCS) and multi-scale feature
enhanced convolution (MFEC). Introduce one-time inte-
gration unit with RMCS (OIU-RMCS) and module based
on MFEC (M-MFEC). Finally, we construct I-YOLO Fig. 3 The structure of M-MFEC
framework by integrating OIU-RMCS and M-MFEC into
a YOLO-based detector. Our proposed I-YOLO uses
multi-scale feature learning and feature fusion strategy these two components, our method achieves the state-of-the-
to obtain accurate detection of small objects. We will art performance on two datasets, such as AI-TODv2 and
release our trained models. Small-PCB. Thus, the design of these modules is novel and
2. Build a large-scale small object detection dataset named contributes to the overall effectiveness of our approach.
Small-PCB. It concentrates on the semiconductor indus- The remainder of this work is arranged as follows.
try. Small-PCB includes 8806 high-resolution printed cir- Section 2 briefly introduces related works. The proposed
cuit board (PCB) images and annotates 39,894 instances method and experiments are described in Sects. 3 and 4, sev-
across 6 categories. This dataset we will release makes erally. Section 5 concludes this paper.
up for the lack of small object detection datasets in indus-
trial scenarios and will facilitate future research in this
field. The resources are available.1
3. We evaluate the effectiveness of our method on two
datasets, including Small-PCB and AI-TODv2. A large 2 Related work
number of qualitative and quantitative results indicate
that our proposed detector (such as I-YOLOm) achieves 2.1 Datasets for small object detection
state-of-the-art detection performance on AI-TODv2 and
our constructed Small-PCB datasets. Datasets are the foundation of deep learning-based object
detectors. However, there are few datasets dedicated to detect
small objects. Therefore, lots of works have to be evalu-
The principal contributions mentioned above once again
ated on the subset of large-scale datasets (e.g. MS-COCO
reveal the novelty of our work. A new dataset named Small-
[23] and WIDER FACE [24]) that satisfy the definition of
PCB is constructed to make up for the lack of small object
small objects. Recently, some small object detection datasets
dataset in industrial scenarios and further facilitate the dis-
have been proposed, including SDOD-MT [25], SOD [26],
covery of small defects in the semiconductor industry at an
TinyPerson [27], TT100K [51] and AI-TOD [52]. Specif-
early stage. In addition, the proposed two components are
ically, AI-TOD dedicates to aerial scenes. SDOD-MT and
cleverly integrated and applied to the YOLO detector. At the
SOD are devoted to small object detection in daily life.
same time, they themselves have special designs. Concretely,
TinyPerson and TT100K concentrate on tiny-person and traf-
MFEC splits input channels into four parts and applies
fic signs detection, respectively. These datasets mentioned
convolutions with different sizes to each part, and adopts
above either do not involve industrial scenarios or are small
point-by-point convolution to fuse individual channel fea-
in scale (TinyPerson with 1610 images and SOD only with
tures. RMCS not only uses structural re-parameterization, but
8393 instances), while our Small-PCB contains 8806 PCB
also channel shuffle. Channel shuffle can strengthen feature
images and 39,894 object instances. Our Small-PCB is cru-
information interaction between different channel groups,
cial for defect detection in the semiconductor industry. In
which bring more informative feature clues. In other words,
addition, existing industrial datasets (e.g. Augmented PCB
MFEC captures effective features of the objects through
[28] and DeepPCB [29]) have low spatial resolution, which
multi-scale feature learning. RMCS adopts feature fusion to
hinder the detection of small objects. Compared to the Aug-
obtain the discriminant features of the objects. By combining
mented PCB (600 × 600) and DeepPCB (640 × 640), the
average resolution at 2613×2093 in our Small-PCB presents
1 https://github.com/graceveryear/iyolo. a clear advantage.

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Fig. 4 Visualized results between YOLOv8m (left) and our I-YOLOm (right) on the AI-TODv2 dataset

Table 1 Numbers of instances of

each category under different Category Missing hole Mouse bite Open circuit Spurious copper Short Spur
divisions of Small-PCB
Instances
Trainval 2484 2372 10,824 2392 11,508 2302
Test 498 580 2834 626 2848 626

2.2 Approaches for small object detection
Generally, existing paradigms of small object detection
introduce some custom components into the generic object
detectors. These works cover several aspects, including
super-resolution scheme [30–33], optimization of loss func-
tion [34–37], contextual clues [38–40], feature fusion [43,
44, 47–49], and multi-scale feature learning [41–46].
Super-resolution scheme often uses generative adversar-
ial network (GAN). A common GAN contains a generator
and discriminator network, contesting with each other in a
minimax optimization framework. Li et al. [30] declare that
perceptual GAN narrow the gap of representation between
large objects and small ones. For detecting small-scale faces
and common small objects, Zhang et al. [31] proposed multi-
task GAN. Its generator aims at up-sampling small fuzzy
pictures into fine-scale ones and recovering details to realize

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I-YOLO: a novel single-stage framework for small object detection

Table 2 The performance of

different methods on AI-TODv2 Year Method AP AP50 AP75 APvt APt APs APm
validation set
2023 GFL [72] 15.0 33.6 10.7 2.3 12.2 23.4 34.6
2022 SSPNet [57] 13.1 30.3 8.8 0.0 9.7 27.1 37.6
2021 DyHead [73] 14.0 32.0 9.5 1.7 10.9 22.9 37.9
2021 TOOD [74] 18.6 43.0 12.7 3.2 16.8 26.2 38.1
2021 Cascade R-CNN [75] 14.4 32.7 10.6 0.0 9.9 28.3 39.9
2020 ATSS [76] 15.5 36.5 9.6 1.9 12.7 24.6 36.2
2020 RetinaNet [35] 7.4 21.1 3.5 2.5 6.5 13.1 22.9
2019 FASF [77] 14.4 35.3 8.4 3.4 14.4 19.9 24.2
2019 TridentNet [78] 9.7 23.3 6.5 0.0 5.2 20.5 32.7
2017 Faster RCNN [69] 12.4 28.3 8.1 0.0 8.4 26.3 36.2
2023 YOLOv8m 18.2 41.3 13.6 3.9 15.8 26.2 42.0
2023 I-YOLOm 19.1 44.0 13.3 3.7 16.4 27.5 42.3

Bold and underline fonts indicate the best and suboptimal results, severally. (in %)

Table 3 Category-wise AP of
different methods on AI-TODv2 Method Airplane Bridge Storage Ship Swimming Vehicle Person Wind
validation set tank pool mill

GFL [72] 10.4 0.0 29.2 26.3 25.7 25.1 3.5 0.0
SSPNet 15.5 3.8 22.8 20.1 23.4 15.8 3.5 0.2
[57]
DyHead 11.4 5.8 25.1 22.9 22.7 19.6 3.8 0.4
[73]
TOOD [74] 14.6 8.5 35.3 31.5 26.2 27.2 5.1 0.6
Cascade 13.8 5.5 22.6 24.5 28.2 17.4 3.4 0.0
R-CNN
[75]
ATSS [76] 13.7 3.4 30.2 25.6 24.2 22.5 3.9 0.1
RetinaNet 2.4 7.5 13.0 18.8 2.9 12.3 2.3 0.1
[35]
FASF [77] 1.6 8.6 30.5 31.4 14.8 23.2 4.9 0.1
TridentNet 12.2 0.0 17.9 13.5 20.0 11.9 1.9 0.0
[78]
Faster 13.4 2.9 21.7 19.2 24.7 14.4 2.8 0.0
RCNN
[69]
YOLOv8m 21.2 11.9 37.2 30.4 21.7 28.9 6.75 0.804
I-YOLOm 23.3 12.7 38.2 30.7 24.9 29.1 6.99 1.69

Bold and underline fonts indicate the best and suboptimal results. (in %)

accurate detection. Furthermore, QueryDet [53] predicts the
potential locations of small objects in the low-resolution fea-
tures, and construct sparse feature maps at these locations
utilizing high-resolution features, which accelerate detec-
tions.
The optimization of loss function can help detect small
objects. Liu et al. [34] designed feedback-driven loss function
could supervise small objects more efficiently and effec-
tively. The models can be trained in a balanced manner by
taking the loss distribution clues as the feedback signal. In
terms of the class-imbalance, Zhang et al. [37] assign larger
weights to minority real PCB defects and then optimize
cost-sensitive residual CNN by minimizing the weighted
cross-entropy loss function.
Oliva and Torralba [54] claim the surroundings of the
small object provide useful context-based clues to help detect
the target object. Thus, contextual clues are of significance
for small objects. Leng et al. [38] build an internal–external
network (IENet), which make use of the appearance and con-
text of objects for robust small object detection. Afterwards,

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Fig. 5 Comparison of visual detection results before and after adding noise in daytime scene

Fig. 6 Comparison of visual detection results before and after adding noise in night scene

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I-YOLO: a novel single-stage framework for small object detection

Fig. 7 Comparison between our methods and baselines loss curve

Table 4 The results of different detectors on the Small-PCB test-set

Method AP AP50 AP75 Missing hole Mouse bite Open circuit Spurious copper short Spur

FR with Swin-T 58.2 99.1 62.5 63.5 57.2 57.5 58.5 56.2 56.3
Faster RCNN 57.7 99.1 61.3 63.4 56.6 57.1 56.8 57.6 54.6
RetinaNet 55.6 98.8 55.1 62.8 52.6 55.5 54.8 55.0 53.0
Sparse RCNN 54.5 95.8 55.8 60.2 53.9 55.2 52.0 55.0 50.5
FCOS 62.8 99.4 73.9 68.8 62.1 61.1 63.3 60.7 61.0
I-YOLOn 58.8 97.8 66.3 64.4 57.8 58.2 59.8 58.9 57.0
I-YOLOs 62.9 98.3 73.1 69.0 64.3 60.6 65.6 61.1 60.9
I-YOLOm 65.0 98.8 77.5 70.2 68.0 61.6 68.9 61.7 65.4

The best result is marked in bold. (in %)

Leng et al. [55] devise a context-guided reasoning network
(CRNet) to explore the relationships between objects and
adopt easy detected objects to help understand hard ones.
Leng et al. [56] also propose a new pareto refocusing detec-
tion network (PRDet) that distinguishes the hard regions
from vanilla regions under reverse-attention guidance and
refocuses the hard regions with the assistance of the region-
specific context. Yan et al. [40] proposed LocalNet can retain
more details at an early stage to enhance the representation
of small objects. Moreover, the local detail-context module
is devised to strengthen semantic clues of the detection layer,
so as to enhance the missing details in network and employ
the local context within the limited receptive field.
Feature fusion can fuse different level features to promote
the object detection. FS-SSD [49] uses feature scaling with
feature fusion and de-convolution block for predicting dif-
ferent objects better. FA-SSD [39] employs attention module
and feature fusion to integrate features from different lay-
ers. FPN [43] fuses different-level features through adopting
top-down architecture and lateral connections, so as to detect

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 K. Tong, Y. Wu

Fig. 8 Comparison between our

approaches and baselines
performance curve

Table 5 Improvements over baselines on the Small-PCB test-set

Baseline AP AP50 AP75 MH MB OC SC SH SP Param Time

YOLOv8n 57.8 97.5 62.7 64.1 56.6 57.2 58.6 58.1 54.7 3.0 M 1.8 ms
I- 58.8(+ 97.8(+ 66.3(+ 64.4(+ 57.8(+ 58.2(+ 59.8(+ 58.9(+ 57.0(+ 4.9 M 2.1 ms
YOLOn 1.0) 0.3) 3.6) 0.3) 1.2) 1.0) 1.2) 0.8) 2.3)
YOLOv8s 62.3 98.4 72.3 67.6 62.6 60.1 65.8 60.9 61.6 11.1 M 2.5 ms
I- 62.9(+ 98.3(- 73.1(+ 69.0(+ 64.3(+ 60.6(+ 65.6(- 61.1(+ 60.9(- 18.8 M 3.2 ms
YOLOs 0.6) 0.1) 0.8) 1.4) 1.7) 0.5) 0.2) 0.2) 0.7)
YOLOv8m 64.8 98.5 76.1 70.7 65.3 61.2 68.8 61.3 64.9 25.8 M 5.2 ms
I- 65.0(+ 98.8(+ 77.5(+ 70.2(- 68.0(+ 61.6(+ 68.9(+ 61.7(+ 65.4(+ 38.7 M 6.7 ms
YOLOm 0.2) 0.3) 1.4) 0.5) 2.7) 0.4) 0.1) 0.4) 0.5)

We also report the performance gains of proposed method, compared with the baseline. (in %)

small objects better. ABFPN [44] adopt atrous convolution
to reinforce multi-scale feature fusion, in order to facilitate
the small PCB defect detection. SSPNet [57] builds proper
feature-sharing rules for shallow and deep layers to tackle
the problem that there is a gradient inconsistency among dif-
ferent feature maps, which benefit for tiny object detection.
Multi-scale feature learning is also an important mean for
small object detection. SSD [42] uses the features of multiple
layers to predict objects of different sizes, which ameliorates
the detection accuracy to a certain extent. The top-down
architecture and lateral connections of FPN [43] construct
high-level semantic feature maps across various scales. IPG-
Net [45] introduce image pyramid guidance (IPG) into the
backbone network to handle the problem of information
imbalance, thus relieving the feature disappearance of small
objects. Different from IPG-Net, Zheng et al. [46] design an

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I-YOLO: a novel single-stage framework for small object detection
Fig. 9 Visual comparison of small defect missed detection between YOLOv8n (left) and I-YOLOn (right)
interactive multi-scale feature representation enhancement
strategy. Proposed multi-scale auxiliary enhancement net-
work and adaptive interaction module not only scale the input
to multiple scales corresponding to the prediction layer, but
also aggregate the features of adjacent layers, which enhance
the detection of small objects. Gong et al. [58] introduce
fusion factor to control the transmission of information from
deep to shallow layers in the FPN, and explore how to esti-
mate valid value of fusion factor for a particular dataset via
statistical strategy. The model can obtain great improvements
on small objects when appropriate fusion factor is used in the
FPN. Based on FPN, Deng et al. [59] design an extended fea-
ture pyramid network (EFPN) with an extra high-resolution
pyramid level specialized for small traffic-sign detection and
small object detection in common life. To detect small tar-
gets in the infrared images, Wu et al. [60] propose an effective
framework named UIU-Net. It contains two modules, includ-
ing resolution-maintenance deep supervision (RMDS) and
interactive-cross attention (ICA). More concretely, RMDS
is able to produce deep multi-scale resolution-maintenance
features while learning global context clues. ICA can encode
the local context information between the high-level seman-
tic features and low-level details. In short, UIU-Net realizes
the multi-level and multi-scale representation learning of
objects.
3 The proposed method
Figure 1 shows the overall architecture of our proposed
improved YOLO (I-YOLO) framework. It integrates two new
modules into the YOLO-based detector, including one-time
integration unit with RMCS (OIU-RMCS) and module based
on MFEC (M-MFEC). We will focus on re-parameterized
module with channel shuffle (RMCS) and multi-scale fea-
ture enhanced convolution (MFEC) next.
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Fig. 10 Visual comparison of small defect false detection between YOLOv8n (left) and I-YOLOn (right)
3.1 Reparameterized module with channel shuffle
(RMCS)
In the DenseNet [61], dense connections are inefficient. To
overcome this problem, VoVNet [62] and V2[63] design one-
shot aggregation module to build large-scale and lightweight
detectors, which brings faster speed and high efficiency. This
module aggregates all features only once in the last maps
through representing different features with multi-receptive
fields. Inspired by one-shot aggregation module, we devise a
new one-time integration unit with RMCS, dubbed as OIU-
RMCS. As displayed in Fig. 2, stacked RMCS modules allow
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K. Tong, Y. Wu
features to be reused, boosting the signal flow among differ-
ent channels between features of adjacent layers. To ease the
computational burden of network and reduce memory usage,
we maintain only three feature cascades on the one-time inte-
gration path. Motivated via the idea of PANet [64], feature
fusion strategy aligns the feature maps of different sizes to
realize information exchange between the two prediction fea-
ture layers, so as to obtain the object detection with high
accuracy and fast inference. Furthermore, OIU-RMCS can
reduce the memory access cost by keeping the same number
of input channels and minimum output channels.
I-YOLO: a novel single-stage framework for small object detection
Fig. 11 Comparison between the baseline and different components loss curve
Next, we will focus on reparameterized module with
channel shuffle (RMCS). The RMCS is motivated by the
ShuffleNet [65] and Fig. 2 exhibits the structure of RMCS.
Suppose that the input feature dimension is a tensor of
C × H × W , which is divided into two different channel-wise
tensors by the channel splitting operation, whose dimension
is C × H ×W . During training, we adopt the RepVGG (it pri-
marily includes identity branch, 1 × 1 and 3 × 3 convolution)
to build RMCS and train the model. For the inference phase,
RepVGG is replaced with RepConv (it mainly involves 3 × 3
convolution) by employing structural re-parameterization. At
the training stage, multi-branch structure can capture rich
feature clues, while simplified single-branch structure can
accelerate inference and save memory consumption. After
conducting multi-branch training, one tensor will be concate-
nated to another tensor in a channel-wise way. Moreover, the
operation of channel shuffle can strengthen information inter-
action between two tensors. This realizes depth measurement
between different channel features of the input through low
computational complexity.
If we don’t utilize channel shuffle, the output features from
a certain group only correlate the input within this group,
which hinders the signal flow between channel groups and
impairs the capability to extract features. On the contrary,
the usage of channel shuffle can achieve more efficient fea-
ture information interaction between different groups. This
moment, the input and output features are completely cor-
related, meaning that one convolutional group can obtain
data information from the other groups. The channel shuf-
fle brings more informative feature clues, by operating on
stacked grouped convolutions.
3.2 Multi-scale feature enhanced convolution
(MFEC)
Figure 3 depicts the architecture of module based on MFEC
(M-MFEC). Our proposed multi-scale feature enhanced con-
volution (MFEC) introduces several convolutions of different
sizes, enabling it to learn various spatial features at mul-
tiple scales. It is observed in Fig. 3 that our MFEC splits
input channels into four parts and applies different convolu-
tions to each part, which reduces the computational burden
and parameters. However, these extracted features from con-
volution operation are completed on a single channel part,
and the information between the features of each channel
part is independent. Therefore, we adopt 1 × 1 convolution
kernel to implement point-by-point convolution to fuse indi-
vidual channel features. The mathematical form of MFEC is
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expressed as:
M F EC(X )  conv1×1 (conv1×1 (x1 ), conv3×3 (x2 ),
conv5×5 (x3 ), conv7×7 (x4 ))
where x  {x1 , x2 , x3 , x4 } refers to divide the input feature x
into four parts in the channel dimension. Moreover, conv1×1 ,
conv3×3 , conv5×5 and conv7×7 represent the convolution
kernel with 1 × 1, 3 × 3, 5 × 5 and 7 × 7, respectively.
4 Experiments
4.1 Datasets
1. Small-PCB dataset
The images in our Small-PCB are mainly from PKU-Market-
PCB,2 INTERNET3 and self-built. The PKU-Market-PCB
and INTERNET contain 693 images and 664 images, respec-
tively. The self-built part has 7449 images. Concretely, we
perform horizontal mirroring, vertical mirroring, and hori-
zontal overlay vertical mirroring operations on the images
of existing datasets. In addition to mirroring, we also rotate
the images at a certain angle, such as 5, 60, 120, 180
and 357 degrees. Eventually, we gain 8806 high-resolution
(2613 × 2093) defect images and 39,894 instances. Krishna
and Jawahar [66] indicate that an object is regarded small if
it occupies only less than 1% of the image area. As far as this
definition (relative size) is concerned, the all objects in our
Small-PCB datasets are treated as small objects. We focus on
6 categories, including missing hole (MH), mouse bite (MB),
open circuit (OC), spurious copper (SC), short (SH) and spur
(SP). According to the popular principle of dividing datasets,
Small-PCB is split into two subsets: trainval-set and test-set,
where each subset occupies about 80% (7044 images) and
20% (1762 images). Table 1 shows the numbers of instances
of each class under different divisions of our Small-PCB.
2. AI-TODv2 dataset
It is the dataset with the smallest object size in the earth
observation community. The absolute size of AI-TODv2 is
12.7 pixels. It has re-labeled the AI-TOD [52] to fix many
un-annotated objects in the previous dataset. AI-TODv2
includes 28,036 aerial images (800 × 800) with 752,745
common-seen objects of 8 classes. The specific categories
are follows: airplane, bridge, storage tank, ship, swimming
pool, vehicle, person and wind mill. Due to the test set is
2 https://robotics.pkusz.edu.cn/resources/dataset/.
3 https://aistudio.baidu.com/aistudio/datasetdetail/117696.
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K. Tong, Y. Wu
unavailable, we report the results on validation set. Based on
the absolute size, objects are divided into four subsets: very
tiny objects (2–8 pixels), tiny objects (8–16 pixels), small
(1) objects (16–32 pixels) and medium objects (32–64 pixels).
4.2 Implementation details
We adopt NVIDIA RTX3080Ti GPU to train all the mod-
els, and the datasets utilized are Small-PCB and AI-TODv2
[67]. We use the YOLOv84 as the baseline detector. The
value of weight decay and momentum is 0.0005 and 0.937.
All the models are trained with 100 epochs. For the Small-
PCB, the batch size of our approach (I-YOLOn, I-YOLOs
and I-YOLOm) is set to 32, 32 and 16, severally. For the
AI-TODv2, the batch size of our I-YOLOm is set to 8.
On the Small-PCB dataset, we also re-implemented sev-
eral popular detectors based on the PaddleDetection5 frame-
work, including Sparse RCNN [68], Faster RCNN [69],
RetinaNet [35], FCOS [70] and Swin Transformer [71].
Except for the learning rate, we follow most of the frame-
work’s default settings. For the Sparse RCNN, the learning
rate is set to 0.000025. For the Faster RCNN, RetinaNet,
FCOS and FR with Swin-T, the learning rate both are
0.00125. We set the batch size is 1, 2, 4 for the Faster RCNN
and FR with Swin-T, FCOS and RetinaNet, and Sparse
RCNN, respectively. In the training phase, ‘1x’ schedule (12
epochs) is used. For all the experiments, FPN is employed
to capture hierarchical and detailed representations for better
performance.
4.3 Evaluation metrics
Following the COCO-style [23] evaluation protocol, we
adopt the average precision (AP) and average recall (AR)
to evaluate the performance of detectors. Specifically, the
overall AP is gained by averaging the AP across 10 IoU
thresholds between 0.5 and 0.95 (with an interval of 0.05).
The overall AR refers to the maximum recall given a fixed
number of detections per image, averaged over all categories
and IoU thresholds. AP50 and AP75 denote AP at true posi-
tive detections with IoU thresholds of 0.5 and 0.75, severally.
Since AI-TODv2 dataset enjoys different definitions of spe-
cific size objects, the evaluation representations are slightly
different. Concretely, APvt , APt , APs and APm signify AP
for very tiny, tiny, small and medium objects, respectively.
4 https://github.com/ultralytics/ultralytics.
5 https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleDetection.
I-YOLO: a novel single-stage framework for small object detection

Fig. 12 Comparison between the

baseline and different
components performance curve

Table 6 The performance impact of different components on the Small-PCB test-set

Number M- OIU- AP AP50 AP75 AR1 AR10 AR100 Parameters GFLOPs Times
MFEC RMCS
YOLOv8n (baseline) 57.8 97.5 62.7 18.4 64.9 64.9 3.0 M 8.1 1.8 ms

1 ✓ 58.1(+ 97.6(+ 63.4(+ 18.3(− 65.0(+ 65.0(+ 2.9 M 8.0 2.0 ms

0.3) 0.1) 0.7) 0.1) 0.1) 0.1)
2 ✓ 58.5(+ 97.9(+ 65.4(+ 18.6(+ 65.1(+ 65.2(+ 5.0 M 18.2 2.0 ms
0.7) 0.4) 2.7) 0.2) 0.2) 0.3)
3 ✓ ✓ 58.8(+ 97.8(+ 66.3(+ 18.5(+ 65.4(+ 65.5(+ 4.9 M 18.1 2.1 ms
1.0) 0.3) 3.6) 0.1) 0.5) 0.6)

We also report the performance gains from newly-added components. (in %)

4.4 Comparison with state-of-the-art methods
4.4.1 Results on the AI-TODv2 dataset
As exhibited in Fig. 4, we show the visual comparison
between the baseline YOLOv8m and our I-YOLOm. It is
obvious that our model can predict more object instances,
such as ship and vehicle, than YOLOv8m.
Moreover, we also compare ten state-of-the-art meth-
ods with our approach, including GFL [72], SSPNet [57],
DyHead [73], TOOD [74], Cascade R-CNN [75], ATSS
[76], RetinaNet [35], FASF [77], TridentNet [78] and Faster
RCNN [69]. From Table 2, we find that I-YOLOm achieves
the top performance, with AP and AP50 metric results of
19.1% and 44.0% respectively. It surpasses the second-
place detector (TOOD) by 0.5% and 1.0%, severally. When
delving deeper into specific metrics, we observe that our

123

approach obtains one first place (APm ) and three second
places (APvt , APt and APs ). Compared with the baseline
detector YOLOv8m, our I-YOLOm achieves gains of 0.6%,
1.3% and 0.3% on metrics APt , APs and APm , respectively.
In terms of category-wise AP, our I-YOLOm outperforms
other detectors as observed in Table 3. I-YOLOm achieves
top results on six categories, such as airplane, bridge, stor-
age tank, vehicle, person and wind mill. Compared to the
baseline YOLOv8m, our I-YOLOm brings varying degrees
of improvement across all eight categories, which once again
confirms the visualization results in Fig. 4.
As we all known, the remote sensing data usually tend
to suffer from various degradation and noise effects in the
process of imaging [79]. We further explore the detection
performance of our approach by using these noisy images.
Figures 5 and 6 show the visual detection results before
and after adding noise (salt-and-pepper noise and Gaussian
noise) in the daytime and night scenarios, respectively. From
Fig. 5, it can be observed that the detection performance of
the model decreases when the images in the daytime scene
suffer from salt-and-pepper noise and Gaussian noise. At
this point, salt-and-pepper noise has a great impact on object
detection results than Gaussian noise. The night scene image
in Fig. 6 also exhibits the same phenomenon. At this time,
the model can only detect a small portion of the object or
even cannot accurately detect the object, as shown in Fig. 6c
and b. It can be seen that these degradation and noise have a
significant impact on the performance of the detector.
4.4.2 Results on the small-PCB dataset
Table 4 lists the detection results of our proposed approaches
and several representative methods (such as FR with Swin-T,
Faster RCNN, RetinaNet, Sparse RCNN and FCOS) on the
Small-PCB test-set. FCOS wins the first place in ranking with
AP50 of 99.4%, while our I-YOLOm reaches AP of 65.0%
and AP75 of 77.5%, which steadily outperform other algo-
rithms. In addition, I-YOLOm obtains the best performance
in each category. More concretely, our I-YOLOm shows
great dominance in several classes, including mouse bite
(14.1 points higher), spurious copper (16.9 points higher),
spur (14.9 points higher), compared with Sparse RCNN.
For the detector FCOS, I-YOLOm outperforms 4.4%, 5.6%
and 5.9% on category spur, spurious copper and mouse bite,
respectively.
4.4.3 Improvements over baseline detectors
Figure 7 displays the comparison between our methods and
baselines loss curve. Meanwhile, we report the comparison
between our approaches and baselines performance curve in
Fig. 8.
123
K. Tong, Y. Wu
From these qualitative graphs, it can be observed that our
method outperforms the baseline detector. More concretely,
for the baseline YOLOv8n, YOLOv8s and YOLOv8m, our
approaches (I-YOLOn, I-YOLOs and I-YOLOm) all achieve
varying degrees of performance improvement, as shown in
the performance curve in Fig. 8.
In addition to qualitative results, we also conducted
quantitative analysis. Table 5 shows the comparison (over-
all performance, category-wise AP, parameters and time)
between our methods and baselines (YOLOv8n, YOLOv8s
and YOLOv8m). In terms of parameters and time, our
approaches have a slight increase over the baselines. But
overall performance, our methods are significantly better
than the three baseline detectors. More concretely, for met-
rics AP, AP50 and AP75 , our I-YOLOn achieves the gains of
1.0%, 0.3% and 3.6%, compared to the YOLOv8n. Moreover,
for YOLOv8m, our I-YOLOm obtains performance improve-
ments of 0.2%, 0.3% and 1.4%, respectively. If we dig into
the specific categories, our detectors also show dominance
in these classes. In particular, compared to YOLOv8n and
YOLOv8m, our I-YOLOn and I-YOLOm obtain great gains
for category spur (2.3 points higher) and mouse bite (2.7
points higher).
4.4.4 Visualization results
In addition to the quantitative analysis mentioned above, we
also exhibit the qualitative results. Taking our I-YOLOn and
baseline YOLOv8n as an example, the visual comparison
between the two is displayed in Figs. 9 and 10, respectively.
Compared to YOLOv8n, I-YOLOn can detect more
instances, such as spurious copper and short, as shown
in Fig. 9. Furthermore, our proposed I-YOLOn can accu-
rately detect some categories (such as mouse bite and spur)
incorrectly detected by the baseline detector (YOLOv8n) in
Fig. 10.
4.4.5 Component analysis
We investigate the individual contributions of each com-
ponent via conducting an ablation study on our I-YOLOn.
Figures 11 and 12 show the comparison between the base-
line and different components loss curve and performance
curve, respectively.
As a qualitative result, the curves in the figure also show
the superiority of our proposed components. Compared with
the baseline YOLOv8n, the proposed OIU-RMCS and M-
MFEC both bring certain performance improvements. In
particular, when OIU-RMCS and M-MFEC are used in
combination, the performance improvement is even more
significant.
In addition, we report the quantitative results. The effects
of all the proposed approaches on the model’s performance
I-YOLO: a novel single-stage framework for small object detection
Table 7 Effects of different components on category-wise AP on the Small-PCB test-set
Number M-MFEC OIU-RMCS Missing hole
YOLOv8n (baseline) 64.1
1 ✓ 64.2
2 ✓ 63.9
3 ✓ ✓ 64.4 (+ 0.3)
We also report the performance gains from newly-added M-MFEC and OIU-RMCS, compared with the baseline. (in %)
are shown in Tables 6 and 7. Overall, our approach has better
detection performance and stable processing times compared
to the baseline, although the value of GFLOPs is slightly
larger. Specifically, it is observed that presented M-MFEC
enjoys fewer parameters and proves to be effective for object
detection, resulting in 0.3%, 0.1% and 0.7% gains in AP,
AP50 and AP75 , respectively. Moreover, the usage of pro-
posed OIU-RMCS leads to 0.7%, 0.4% and 2.7% increase in
terms of AP, AP50 and AP75 . The combination of these two
components has brought significant improvements to metrics
AP, AP50 and AP75 , with gains of 1.0%, 0.3% and 3.6%, sev-
erally. For metrics AR1 , AR10 and AR100 , the combination
of these two components achieve the improvements, com-
pared with the baseline. Moreover, for specific categories, the
integration of OIU-RMCS and M-MFEC also brings vary-
ing degrees of performance improvement, as demonstrated
in Table 7. The combined use of components OIU-RMCS
and M-MFEC brings significant gains in category spur (2.3
points higher).
5 Conclusion
This work first devises two new modules, including re-
parameterized module with channel shuffle (RMCS) and
multi-scale feature enhanced convolution (MFEC). Then,
we propose an effective I-YOLO detector by integrating
OIU-RMCS and M-MFEC into a YOLO-based detector. In
addition, we construct a large-scale dataset dubbed Small-
PCB in order to facilitate industrial small object detection.
Our Small-PCB includes 8806 high-resolution PCB images
and 39,894 instances of 6 classes. The experimental results
indicate that our approach achieves the state-of-the-art per-
formance on the popular AI-TODv2 and Small-PCB datasets.
In the future, we will continue to study the small object
dataset and the small object itself. In terms of the dataset,
we aim to extend the Small-PCB dataset to more defects in
real-world scenarios to better study industrial semiconductor
inspection. For small object itself, we will further exp lore
the semantic and contextual information to help improve the
detection performance of the small objects.
Mouse bite Open circuit Spurious copper Short Spur
56.6 57.2 58.6 58.1 54.7
56.1 56.9 60.1 58.4 53.8
56.5 58.6 60.2 58.8 56.2
57.8 (+ 1.2) 58.2 (+ 1.0) 59.8 (+ 1.2) 58.9 (+ 0.8) 57.0 (+ 2.3)
Author contributions K. T. conducted all the experiments and wrote
the main manuscript text, including figures and tables. Y. Q. W. and K.
T. reviewed the manuscript.
Data availability The link to obtain the dataset has been provided in
this article.
Declarations
Conflict of interest The authors declare that they have no conflict of
interest or personal relationships related to the work in this paper.
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 K. Tong, Y. Wu

Yiquan Wu received his M.S.

and Ph.D. degrees from Nanjing
University of Aeronautics and
Astronautics in 1987 and 1998,
respectively. He is currently a
professor and Ph.D. supervisor
in the Department of Information
and Communication Engineering
at the Nanjing University of
Aeronautics and Astronautics.
His research interests include
image processing and machine
vision.

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