We cordially invite you to participate in our MVA2023 Challenge on Small Object Detection for Birds.
Challenge description: The task of this challenge is to detect tiny birds on images, which is categorized to the Small Object Detection (SOD) problem. Distant-bird detection is an important function for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) such as drones to avoid bird attacks, or drive away harmful birds that destroy fields and rice paddies. Thus, this challenge not only raises academic issues in Computer Vision but also promotes practical technology developments that are expected to be employed in real-world applications. The images in our dataset are captured from drones. In addition to the general difficulties of SOD (e.g., lack of geometrical information for small objects), the annotated birds are of different types (e.g., hawk, crow, and wild bird), and have different parallax, postures, and different degrees of motion blur.
The Challenge consists of two categories “Research Category” and “Development Category to encourage a wide range of participants from academia and industry. Participants must select one of the categories at the time of participation.
– Research Category: Participants are expected to not only exhibit the top performance but also propose novel technical contribution(s). Accordingly, each participant of this category is required to submit a technical paper.
– Development Category: Participants can focus solely on achieving the top performance. No novel technical contribution is required.

Challenge webpage:
http://www.mva-org.jp/mva2023/challenge

Top-ranking participants in the research category are invited to present their paper at MVA2023 and co-author a summary paper for the Challenge.

Prize Money & Awards
– Research Category
Rank    Prize Money     Award
1st     300 K.JPY       Best Solution Award     
2nd     200 K.JPY       –
3rd     100 K.JPY       –
4th?6th  50 K.JPY       –
All the rankers in the research category can present thier results in the oral presentation session in the main MVA conference.

Technical Category
Rank    Prize Money     Award
1st     100 K.JPY       Winner Award
2nd?5th  50 K.JPY       –

Tentative Schedule:
– Start of the Challenge (development phase)            2023.1.9
– Fact sheets, code/executable submission deadline      2023.4.14
– Paper submission deadline (only Research Category)    2023.5.7
– Test results release to the participants              2023.6.15

ORGANIZATION
Norimichi Ukita, Toyota Technological Institute, Japan
Yuki Kondo, Toyota Motor Corporation, Japan
Kaikai Zhao, Toyota Technological Institute, Japan
Kazutoshi Akita, Toyota Technological Institute, Japan
Takayuki Yamaguchi, Iwate Agricultural Research Center, Japan
Masatsugu Kidode, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan