All case studies
ResearchEcology / Computer Vision

Small Object Detection in Aerial Imagery

YOLOv8 variants for tiny birds in drone frames—benchmarked for real-world ecology and surveillance use cases.

CHARUSAT Research · 2023 – 2024January 20244 min read

Problem & industry context

Aerial imagery makes objects appear small and dense; generic detectors tuned on COCO underperform on birds, drones, and wildlife monitoring. Researchers compare anchor-free detectors (YOLOv8 family) on domain-specific datasets and report precision-recall tradeoffs per model size (nano vs medium vs extra-large).

Insight

Small-object detection is a scale and resolution problem before it is an architecture fad. Choosing yolov8n vs yolov8x is a deployment decision (edge drone vs server batch), not only a leaderboard exercise. Cross-domain papers should document failure modes—occlusion, motion blur, class imbalance.

What I built

Benchmarked YOLOv8n, yolov8m, and yolov8x for small bird detection in aerial imagery. Published at AIP ICRAIC 2024 (Scopus-indexed). Highlighted practical implications for avian ecology and surveillance pipelines.

Technical approach

Stack and tooling for this work: Python, YOLOv8, Deep Learning, Object Detection. Topics covered: YOLOv8, Computer Vision, Aerial Imagery, Research.

Topics

YOLOv8Computer VisionAerial ImageryResearch