  With the rise of deep convolutional neural networks, object detection has
achieved prominent advances in past years. However, such prosperity could not
camouflage the unsatisfactory situation of Small Object Detection (SOD), one of
the notoriously challenging tasks in computer vision, owing to the poor visual
appearance and noisy representation caused by the intrinsic structure of small
targets. In addition, large-scale dataset for benchmarking small object
detection methods remains a bottleneck. In this paper, we first conduct a
thorough review of small object detection. Then, to catalyze the development of
SOD, we construct two large-scale Small Object Detection dAtasets (SODA),
SODA-D and SODA-A, which focus on the Driving and Aerial scenarios
respectively. SODA-D includes 24828 high-quality traffic images and 278433
instances of nine categories. For SODA-A, we harvest 2513 high resolution
aerial images and annotate 872069 instances over nine classes. The proposed
datasets, as we know, are the first-ever attempt to large-scale benchmarks with
a vast collection of exhaustively annotated instances tailored for
multi-category SOD. Finally, we evaluate the performance of mainstream methods
on SODA. We expect the released benchmarks could facilitate the development of
SOD and spawn more breakthroughs in this field. Datasets and codes are
available at: \url{https://shaunyuan22.github.io/SODA}.
