DQ-DETR: DETR with Dynamic Query for Tiny Object Detection

Despite previous DETR-like methods having performed successfully in generic object detection, tiny object detection is still a challenging task for them since the positional information of object queries is not customized for detecting tiny objects, whose scale is extraordinarily smaller than general objects. Additionally, the fixed number of queries used in DETR-like methods makes them unsuitable for detection if the number of instances is imbalanced between different images. Thus, we present a simple yet effective model, DQ-DETR, consisting of three components: categorical counting module, counting-guided feature enhancement, and dynamic query selection to solve the above-mentioned problems. DQ-DETR uses the prediction and density maps from the categorical counting module to dynamically adjust the number and positional information of object queries. Our model DQ-DETR outperforms previous CNN-based and DETR-like methods, achieving state-of-the-art mAP 30.2% on the AI-TOD-V2 dataset, which mostly consists of tiny objects. Our code will be available at https://github.com/Katie0723/DQ-DETR.