SparseFormer: Detecting Objects in HRW Shots via Sparse Vision Transformer

Recent years have seen an increase in the use of gigapixel-level image and video capture systems and benchmarks with high-resolution wide (HRW) shots. However, unlike close-up shots in the MS COCO dataset, the higher resolution and wider field of view raise unique challenges, such as extreme sparsity and huge scale changes, causing existing close-up detectors inaccuracy and inefficiency. In this paper, we present a novel model-agnostic sparse vision transformer, dubbed SparseFormer, to bridge the gap of object detection between close-up and HRW shots. The proposed SparseFormer selectively uses attentive tokens to scrutinize the sparsely distributed windows that may contain objects. In this way, it can jointly explore global and local attention by fusing coarse- and fine-grained features to handle huge scale changes. SparseFormer also benefits from a novel Cross-slice non-maximum suppression (C-NMS) algorithm to precisely localize objects from noisy windows and a simple yet effective multi-scale strategy to improve accuracy. Extensive experiments on two HRW benchmarks, PANDA and DOTA-v1.0, demonstrate that the proposed SparseFormer significantly improves detection accuracy (up to 5.8%) and speed (up to 3x) over the state-of-the-art approaches.