BFE-Net: Object Detection with Bidirectional Feature Enhancement

Abstract

In realistic scenarios, existing object detection models still face challenges in resisting interference and detecting small objects due to complex environmental factors such as light and noise. For this reason, a novel scheme termed BFE-Net based on bidirectional feature enhancement is proposed. Firstly, a new multi-scale feature extraction module is constructed, which uses a self-attention mechanism to simulate human visual perception. It is used to capture global information and long-range dependencies between pixels, thereby optimizing the extraction of multi-scale features from input images. Secondly, a feature enhancement and denoising module is designed, based on bidirectional information flow. In the top-down, the impact of noise on the feature map is weakened to further enhance the feature extraction. In the bottom-up, multi-scale features are fused to improve the accuracy of small object feature extraction. Lastly, a generalized intersection over union regression loss function is employed to optimize the movement direction of predicted bounding boxes, improving the efficiency and accuracy of object localization. Experimental results using the public dataset PASCAL VOC2007test show that our scheme achieves a mean average precision (mAP) of 85% for object detection, which is 2.3% to 8.6% higher than classical methods such as RetinaNet and YOLOv5. Particularly, the anti-interference capability and the performance in detecting small objects show a significant enhancement.