Feature pyramids are widely exploited by both the state-of-the-art one-stage object detectors (e.g., DSSD, RetinaNet, RefineDet) and the two-stage object detectors (e.g., Mask R-CNN, DetNet) to alleviate the problem arising from scale variation across object instances. Although these object detectors with feature pyramids achieve encouraging results, they have some limitations due to that they only simply construct the feature pyramid according to the inherent multi-scale, pyramidal architecture of the backbones which are actually designed for object classification task. Newly, in this work, we present a method called Multi-Level Feature Pyramid Network (MLFPN) to construct more effective feature pyramids for detecting objects of different scales. First, we fuse multi-level features (i.e. multiple layers) extracted by backbone as the base feature. Second, we feed the base feature into a block of alternating joint Thinned U-shape Modules and Feature Fusion Modules and exploit the decoder layers of each u-shape module as the features for detecting objects. Finally, we gather up the decoder layers with equivalent scales (sizes) to develop a feature pyramid for object detection, in which every feature map consists of the layers (features) from multiple levels. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed MLFPN, we design and train a powerful end-to-end one-stage object detector we call M2Det by integrating it into the architecture of SSD, which gets better detection performance than state-of-the-art one-stage detectors. Specifically, on MS-COCO benchmark, M2Det achieves AP of 41.0 at speed of 11.8 FPS with single-scale inference strategy and AP of 44.2 with multi-scale inference strategy, which is the new state-of-the-art results among one-stage detectors. The code will be made available on this https URL.
To the best of our knowledge, MS-CNN @cite_24 proposed two sub-networks and first incorporated multi-scale features into deep convolutional neural networks for object detection. The proposal sub-net exploited feature maps of several resolutions to detect multi-scale objects in an image. SSD @cite_23 exploited feature maps from the later layers of VGG16 base-net and extra feature layers for predictions at multiple scales. FPN @cite_6 utilized lateral connections and a top-down pathway to produce a feature pyramid and achieved more powerful representations. DSSD @cite_11 implemented deconvolution layers for aggregating context and enhancing the high-level semantics for shallow features. RefineDet @cite_8 adopted two-step cascade regression, which achieves a remarkable progress on accuracy while keeping the efficiency of SSD.
@cite_8 @cite_6 @cite_24 @cite_23 @cite_11
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Feature pyramids are a basic component in recognition systems for detecting objects at different scales. But recent deep learning object detectors have avoided pyramid representations, in part because they are compute and memory intensive. In this paper, we exploit the inherent multi-scale, pyramidal hierarchy of deep convolutional networks to construct feature pyramids with marginal extra cost. A top-down architecture with lateral connections is developed for building high-level semantic feature maps at all scales. This architecture, called a Feature Pyramid Network (FPN), shows significant improvement as a generic feature extractor in several applications. Using FPN in a basic Faster R-CNN system, our method achieves state-of-the-art single-model results on the COCO detection benchmark without bells and whistles, surpassing all existing single-model entries including those from the COCO 2016 challenge winners. In addition, our method can run at 5 FPS on a GPU and thus is a practical and accurate solution to multi-scale object detection. Code will be made publicly available. A unified deep neural network, denoted the multi-scale CNN (MS-CNN), is proposed for fast multi-scale object detection. The MS-CNN consists of a proposal sub-network and a detection sub-network. In the proposal sub-network, detection is performed at multiple output layers, so that receptive fields match objects of different scales. These complementary scale-specific detectors are combined to produce a strong multi-scale object detector. The unified network is learned end-to-end, by optimizing a multi-task loss. Feature upsampling by deconvolution is also explored, as an alternative to input upsampling, to reduce the memory and computation costs. State-of-the-art object detection performance, at up to 15 fps, is reported on datasets, such as KITTI and Caltech, containing a substantial number of small objects. We present a method for detecting objects in images using a single deep neural network. Our approach, named SSD, discretizes the output space of bounding boxes into a set of default boxes over different aspect ratios and scales per feature map location. At prediction time, the network generates scores for the presence of each object category in each default box and produces adjustments to the box to better match the object shape. Additionally, the network combines predictions from multiple feature maps with different resolutions to naturally handle objects of various sizes. SSD is simple relative to methods that require object proposals because it completely eliminates proposal generation and subsequent pixel or feature resampling stages and encapsulates all computation in a single network. This makes SSD easy to train and straightforward to integrate into systems that require a detection component. Experimental results on the PASCAL VOC, COCO, and ILSVRC datasets confirm that SSD has competitive accuracy to methods that utilize an additional object proposal step and is much faster, while providing a unified framework for both training and inference. For (300 300 ) input, SSD achieves 74.3 mAP on VOC2007 test at 59 FPS on a Nvidia Titan X and for (512 512 ) input, SSD achieves 76.9 mAP, outperforming a comparable state of the art Faster R-CNN model. Compared to other single stage methods, SSD has much better accuracy even with a smaller input image size. Code is available at https: github.com weiliu89 caffe tree ssd. The main contribution of this paper is an approach for introducing additional context into state-of-the-art general object detection. To achieve this we first combine a state-of-the-art classifier (Residual-101[14]) with a fast detection framework (SSD[18]). We then augment SSD+Residual-101 with deconvolution layers to introduce additional large-scale context in object detection and improve accuracy, especially for small objects, calling our resulting system DSSD for deconvolutional single shot detector. While these two contributions are easily described at a high-level, a naive implementation does not succeed. Instead we show that carefully adding additional stages of learned transformations, specifically a module for feed-forward connections in deconvolution and a new output module, enables this new approach and forms a potential way forward for further detection research. Results are shown on both PASCAL VOC and COCO detection. Our DSSD with @math input achieves 81.5 mAP on VOC2007 test, 80.0 mAP on VOC2012 test, and 33.2 mAP on COCO, outperforming a state-of-the-art method R-FCN[3] on each dataset.