How about low resolution images

[lixinghe1999]

❔Question

I am dealing with a custom dataset with low resolution (160 * 128). From my understanding, I should use --img 160 --rect, but the result seems not so good. An alternative way is resize the low resolution to 640, and use --img 640 instead. Maybe the ways above are completely the same thing, or one of them is better.

Or, due to the fact the checkpoints are trained from 640 images. For better result, I need to train from scratch?

Or, I just need to change hyperparameters?

So I wonder which part is correct? And may be the reason behind it? Thanks!

Lixing He

Additional context

[github-actions[bot]]

👋 Hello @lixinghe1999, thank you for your interest in 🚀 YOLOv5! Please visit our ⭐️ Tutorials to get started, where you can find quickstart guides for simple tasks like Custom Data Training all the way to advanced concepts like Hyperparameter Evolution.

If this is a 🐛 Bug Report, please provide screenshots and minimum viable code to reproduce your issue, otherwise we can not help you.

If this is a custom training ❓ Question, please provide as much information as possible, including dataset images, training logs, screenshots, and a public link to online W&B logging if available.

For business inquiries or professional support requests please visit https://www.ultralytics.com or email Glenn Jocher at glenn.jocher@ultralytics.com.

Requirements

Python 3.8 or later with all requirements.txt dependencies installed, including torch>=1.7. To install run:

$ pip install -r requirements.txt

Environments

YOLOv5 may be run in any of the following up-to-date verified environments (with all dependencies including CUDA/CUDNN, Python and PyTorch preinstalled):

• Google Colab and Kaggle notebooks with free GPU:
• Google Cloud Deep Learning VM. See GCP Quickstart Guide
• Amazon Deep Learning AMI. See AWS Quickstart Guide
• Docker Image. See Docker Quickstart Guide

Status

If this badge is green, all YOLOv5 GitHub Actions Continuous Integration (CI) tests are currently passing. CI tests verify correct operation of YOLOv5 training (train.py), testing (test.py), inference (detect.py) and export (export.py) on MacOS, Windows, and Ubuntu every 24 hours and on every commit.

[glenn-jocher]

@lixinghe1999 👋 Hello! Thanks for asking about improving training results. Most of the time good results can be obtained with no changes to the models or training settings, provided your dataset is sufficiently large and well labelled. If at first you don't get good results, there are steps you might be able to take to improve, but we always recommend users first train with all default settings before considering any changes. This helps establish a performance baseline and spot areas for improvement.

If you have questions about your training results we recommend you provide the maximum amount of information possible if you expect a helpful response, including results plots (train losses, val losses, P, R, mAP), PR curve, confusion matrix, training mosaics, test results and dataset statistics images such as labels.png. All of these are located in your project/name directory, typically yolov5/runs/train/exp.

We've put together a full guide for users looking to get the best results on their YOLOv5 trainings below.

Dataset

• Images per class. ≥1.5k images per class
• Instances per class. ≥10k instances (labeled objects) per class total
• Image variety. Must be representative of deployed environment. For real-world use cases we recommend images from different times of day, different seasons, different weather, different lighting, different angles, different sources (scraped online, collected locally, different cameras) etc.
• Label consistency. All instances of all classes in all images must be labelled. Partial labelling will not work.
• Label accuracy. Labels must closely enclose each object. No space should exist between an object and it's bounding box. No objects should be missing a label.
• Background images. Background images are images with no objects that are added to a dataset to reduce False Positives (FP). We recommend about 0-10% background images to help reduce FPs (COCO has 1000 background images for reference, 1% of the total).

Model Selection

Larger models like YOLOv5x and YOLOv5x6 will produce better results in nearly all cases, but have more parameters, require more CUDA memory to train, and are slower to run. For mobile deployments we recommend YOLOv5s/m, for cloud deployments we recommend YOLOv5l/x. See our README table for a full comparison of all models.

• Start from Pretrained weights. Recommended for small to medium sized datasets (i.e. VOC, VisDrone, GlobalWheat). Pass the name of the model to the --weights argument. Models download automatically from the latest YOLOv5 release.

  python train.py --data custom.yaml --weights yolov5s.pt
                                           yolov5m.pt
                                           yolov5l.pt
                                           yolov5x.pt

• Start from Scratch. Recommended for large datasets (i.e. COCO, Objects365, OIv6). Pass the model architecture yaml you are interested in, along with an empty --weights '' argument:

  python train.py --data custom.yaml --weights '' --cfg yolov5s.yaml
                                                    yolov5m.yaml
                                                    yolov5l.yaml
                                                    yolov5x.yaml

Training Settings

Before modifying anything, first train with default settings to establish a performance baseline. A full list of train.py settings can be found in the train.py argparser.

• Epochs. Start with 300 epochs. If this overfits early then you can reduce epochs. If overfitting does not occur after 300 epochs, train longer, i.e. 600, 1200 etc epochs.
• Image size. COCO trains at native resolution of --img 640, though due to the high amount of small objects in the dataset it can benefit from training at higher resolutions such as --img 1280. If there are many small objects then custom datasets will benefit from training at native or higher resolution. Best inference results are obtained at the same --img as the training was run at, i.e. if you train at --img 1280 you should also test and detect at --img 1280.
• Batch size. Use the largest --batch-size that your hardware allows for. Small batch sizes produce poor batchnorm statistics and should be avoided.
• Hyperparameters. Default hyperparameters are in hyp.scratch.yaml. We recommend you train with default hyperparameters first before thinking of modifying any. In general, increasing augmentation hyperparameters will reduce and delay overfitting, allowing for longer trainings and higher final mAP. Reduction in loss component gain hyperparameters like hyp['obj'] will help reduce overfitting in those specific loss components. For an automated method of optimizing these hyperparameters, see our Hyperparameter Evolution Tutorial.

Further Reading

If you'd like to know more a good place to start is Karpathy's 'Recipe for Training Neural Networks', which has great ideas for training that apply broadly across all ML domains: http://karpathy.github.io/2019/04/25/recipe/

[lixinghe1999]

Update from myself. Change img-size is enough to train image of different resolution, seems yolov5 is super adaptive. My experiment results show: 640: 80map, downsample to 320: 60map, dowmsample to 160: 30map. Downsample: bicubic.

[glenn-jocher]

@lixinghe1999 yeah your experiment sounds about right. Also note if you train at 640 you can still run inference at lower resolutions like 320, 160 later on also. If you train at 160, your best inference results will be at 160 or smaller.

[maciej-autobon]

@lixinghe1999 Glenn's suggestion to use a model trained on the 640 resolution to then run inference against 320 or even 160 images is actually super-valuable and in my case (160) I got a mAP of around 0.76 (give or take, it's not relevant what the exact number was) when using a model trained on 640 images, but a mAP of 0.61 when using a model trained on 160 images.

The intuition for that is: you do have low-resolution objects in the 640 images either way, the model can learn to detect them, but in addition to that you also have large objects which can still be valuable for learning more robust feature maps.

[github-actions[bot]]

👋 Hello, this issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. Please note it will be closed if no further activity occurs.

Access additional YOLOv5 🚀 resources:

• Wiki – https://github.com/ultralytics/yolov5/wiki
• Tutorials – https://docs.ultralytics.com/yolov5
• Docs – https://docs.ultralytics.com

Access additional Ultralytics ⚡ resources:

• Ultralytics HUB – https://ultralytics.com
• Vision API – https://ultralytics.com/yolov5
• About Us – https://ultralytics.com/about
• Join Our Team – https://ultralytics.com/work
• Contact Us – https://ultralytics.com/contact

Feel free to inform us of any other issues you discover or feature requests that come to mind in the future. Pull Requests (PRs) are also always welcomed!

Thank you for your contributions to YOLOv5 🚀 and Vision AI ⭐!