BackNet: An Enhanced Backbone Network for Accurate Detection of Objects with Large Scale Variations

Abstract

Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have induced significant progress in the field of computer vision including object detection and classification. Two-stage detectors like Faster RCNN and its variants are found to be more accurate compared to its one-stage counter-parts. Faster RCNN combines an ImageNet pretrained backbone network (e.g VGG16) and a Region Proposal Network (RPN) for object detection. Although Faster RCNN performs well on medium and large scale objects, detecting smaller ones with high accuracy while maintaining stable performance on larger objects still remains a challenging task. In this work, we focus on designing a robust backbone network for Faster RCNN that is capable of detecting objects with large variations in scale. Considering the difficulties posed by small objects, our aim is to design a backbone network that allows signals extracted from small objects to be propagated right through to the deepest layers of the network. This being our motivation, we propose a robust network: BackNet, which can be integrated as a backbone into any two-stage detector. We evaluate the performance of BackNet-Faster RCNN on MS COCO dataset and show that the proposed method outperforms five contemporary methods.