Object detection models often struggle with class imbalance, where rare categories appear significantly less frequently than common ones.
Existing rebalancing strategies for class imbalance, such as Repeat Factor Sampling (RFS) and Instance-Aware Repeat Factor Sampling (IRFS), have limitations in long-tailed distributions.
This work introduces Exponentially Weighted Instance-Aware Repeat Factor Sampling (E-IRFS), an extension of IRFS that applies exponential scaling to better rebalance rare and frequent classes in object detection.
E-IRFS improves detection performance by 22% over the baseline, outperforming RFS and IRFS, especially for rare categories, in resource-constrained environments like UAV-based emergency monitoring.