FocusOVD: Geometric and Contextual Feature Refinement for Open-Vocabulary Small-Object Detection

Abstract

Open-vocabulary object detection aims to detect both seen and unseen categories by leveraging the semantic knowledge of vision-language models. However, existing methods often struggle with small objects due to insufficient preservation of high-resolution details, ineffective information aggregation across feature levels, and limited region-level discriminability. To address these challenges, we propose FocusOVD, an open-vocabulary object detector that enhances small-object representations without modifying the frozen VLM backbone. FocusOVD introduces three complementary components: a Reweighted Cross-scale Feature Fusion module, which learns normalized level-wise weights to adaptively balance shallow appearance details and deep semantic cues during feature pyramid aggregation; a Residual Pinwheel-shaped Gated Convolution module, which strengthens local geometric responses in high-resolution features; and a Residual Convolutional Gated Linear Unit module, which suppresses background-dominated activations and enhances RoI discriminability before prediction. Extensive experiments on COCO-OVD and LVIS-OVD demonstrate the effectiveness of FocusOVD. On COCO-OVD, FocusOVD achieves a novel-category AP of 36.3%, outperforming CORA, UniDetector, and SAMP by 1.3%, 1.1%, and 1.5%, respectively; on LVIS-OVD, it achieves an overall AP of 33.7%, surpassing the strongest competing method by 0.6%. These results demonstrate the strong generalization ability of FocusOVD for open-vocabulary small-object detection.