MGFPN: Enhancing multi-scale feature for object detection

Abstract

Feature pyramids are commonly applied to solve the scale variation problem for object detection. One of the most representative works of feature pyramid is Feature Pyramid Network (FPN), which is simple and efficient. However, the fully power of multi-scale features might not be completely exploited in FPN due to its design defects. In this paper, we first analyze the structure problems of FPN which prevent the multi-scale feature from being fully exploited, then propose a new feature pyramid structure named Mixed Group FPN (MGFPN), to mitigate these design defects of FPN. Concretely, MGFPN strengthens the feature utilization by two modules named Mixed Group Convolution(MGConv) and Contextual Attention(CA). MGConv reduces the spatial information loss of FPN in feature generation stage. And CA narrows the semantic gaps between features of different receptive field before lateral summation. By replacing FPN with MGFPN in FCOS, our method can improve the performance of detectors in many major backbones by 0.7 to 1.2 Average Precision(AP) on MS-COCO benchmark without adding too much parameters and it is easy to be extended to other FPN-based models. The proposed MGFPN can serve as a simple and strong alternative for many other FPN based models.