A single-shot multi-level feature reused neural network for object detection

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed the significant progress in object detection using deep convolutional neutral networks. However, there are few object detectors achieving high precision with low computational cost. In this paper, a novel and lightweight framework named multi-level feature reused detector (MFRDet) is proposed, which can reach a better accuracy than two-stage methods. It also can maintain comparable high efficiency of one-stage methods without employing very deep convolution neural networks as most modern detectors do. The proposed framework is suitable for reusing information included in deep and shallow feature maps, by which property the detection precision can be higher. For the Pascal VOC2007 test set trained with VOC 2007 and VOC 2012 training sets, the proposed MFRDet with the input size of 300 $$\times $$ 300 can achieve 80.7% mAP at the speed of 62.5 FPS. As for a high-resolution input version, MFRDet can obtain 82.0% mAP with the speed of 37.0 FPS using single Nvidia Tesla P100 GPU. The proposed framework shows the state-of-the-art mAP with high FPS, which is better than most of other modern object detectors.