A Novel Multi-Scale Feature Fusion Method for Region Proposal Network in Fast Object Detection

Abstract

Neural network models have been widely used in the field of object detecting. The region proposal methods are widely used in the current object detection networks and have achieved well performance. The common region proposal methods hunt the objects by generating thousands of the candidate boxes. Compared to other region proposal methods, the region proposal network (RPN) method improves the accuracy and detection speed with several hundred candidate boxes. However, since the feature maps contains insufficient information, the ability of RPN to detect and locate small-sized objects is poor. A novel multi-scale feature fusion method for region proposal network to solve the above problems is proposed in this article. The proposed method is called multi-scale region proposal network (MS-RPN) which can generate suitable feature maps for the region proposal network. In MS-RPN, the selected feature maps at multiple scales are fine turned respectively and compressed into a uniform space. The generated fusion feature maps are called refined fusion features (RFFs). RFFs incorporate abundant detail information and context information. And RFFs are sent to RPN to generate better region proposals. The proposed approach is evaluated on PASCAL VOC 2007 and MS COCO benchmark tasks. MS-RPN obtains significant improvements over the comparable state-of-the-art detection models.