Abstract
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
<a href="https://github.com/qijiezhao/M2Det">this https URL</a>.
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