Is it ok to use photo collages as dataset instead of single images for training the object detection ssd model?
1.You can use Progressive Resizing in your dataset in order to improve your results.
Link here
This method can be helpful when the images only depict parts of the sample.
2.Also, in order for your model to be good at predicting smaller leaves that do not take the entire images, you should make your validation set balanced ie. a number of smaller leave images and leaves that take the whole image should be balanced in the validation set.
3.I don't know much about the collage-based approach, but you can check this
Hope it helps. Please upvote if it helped.