Net Model Finds Small Objects in Dense Images

This sounds like a very interesting problem in general. Say looking for tiny errors in manufacturing.   And a number of others.

NIST Neural Network Model Finds Small Objects in Dense Images
NIST
August 4, 2020

Computer scientists at the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have created a neural network model to detect small geometric objects in dense images. The researchers modified a network architecture developed by German scientists for analyzing biomedical images in order to retrieve raw data from journal articles that had been degraded or otherwise lost. The images present data points with various markers, mainly circles, triangles, and squares, both filled and open, of differing size and clarity. The model captured 97% of objects in a defined set of test images, finding their centers to within a few pixels of manually selected sites. NIST's Adele Peskin said the technique could find use in other applications, because "object detection is used in a wide range of image analyses, self-driving cars, machine inspections, and so on, for which small, dense objects are particularly hard to locate and separate." .... '