Information Density Imbalance in Visual Object Detection

Abstract

In object detection, the number of instances is typically used to determine whether a dataset exhibits a long-tailed distribution, implicitly assuming that the model will perform poorly on categories with fewer instances. This assumption has led to extensive research on category bias in datasets with imbalanced instance numbers. However, even in datasets where instance numbers are relatively balanced, models still exhibit category bias, indicating that instance count alone cannot explain this phenomenon. In this work, we first introduce the concept and measurement of information density. We then observe a significant negative correlation between a category's information density and its accuracy, and we investigate how the training process impacts this relationship. Empirical studies suggest that information density imbalance may be a potential source of category bias. To preliminarily validate the potential of information density, we made simple improvements to three advanced object detection loss functions using this concept. Experiments on the Pascal VOC, COCO-LT, and LVIS datasets demonstrate that information density can significantly reduce model bias while effectively enhancing the overall performance of existing loss functions. This study provides a new perspective for understanding the generalized bias phenomenon in object detection models and offers new tools for designing fairer loss functions and training strategies.