Towards Disturbance Rejection in Feature Pyramid Network
Xiaobo Hu, Wei Xu, Yi Gan, Jianbo Su, Jun Zhang
Abstract
The multiscale problem is one of the challenging topics in the object detection field. Among the current studies toward this problem, feature pyramid network (FPN) has been shown a superior performance. The core principle of FPN is a mapping for the detectable objects into hierarchy features. These features are designed with different size of receptive fields, which brings good scale invariance in the classification and localization subtasks. However, a disturbance of information dilution is generated by the assignment for the detectable objects into different features. This dilution disturbance is associated with the convolution or pooling operation during the hierarchy feature extraction process. Both of the imprecise localization information in the top features and the fuzzy classification information in the bottom ones limit the performance of FPN. Aiming at the disturbance rejection problem of information dilution, this article presents a feature compensation method. A cross compensation between the semantic information and the localization information in hierarchy features is used to enhance the vanilla FPN. Then, the evaluation metrics in an object detection task are examined. Not only the overall performance, but also the respective metrics for multiscale objects validate a considerable improvement of the FPN with a disturbance compensation mechanism. The experimental results demonstrate an effectiveness of the proposed method in this article.