MRMNet: Multi-scale residual multi-branch neural network for object detection

Abstract

Neural networks in object detection methods are designed to handle the challenging task of multi-scale object detection in computer vision. However, small objects occupy small blocks of pixels, and feature information can easily be overwhelmed, which further leads to certain shortcomings and deficiencies in the network’s multi-scale representation abilities. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel multi-scale residual multi-branch neural network (MRMNet) for object detection. Particularly, we first propose a multi-scale extension (MSE) module to structurally construct optimal solutions to enhance feature extraction and alleviate information loss, thus effectively improving multi-scale object detection performance. Furthermore, we propose a contextual feature refinement (CFR) module, which draws on the idea of residuals to introduce a multi-residual structure and the feature of partial convolution, which can effectively alleviate the problem of small objects being overwhelmed by conflicting semantic information while avoiding the degradation problem of deep feature networks in some sense. Finally, by combining our own MSE module and integrating it into the existing Modified CSP v6 backbone, we propose a new backbone network, the multi-scale residual (MSRes) network. Experimental results show that our MRMNet and MSRes backbone achieve a competitive detection performance of 43.1% AP on the MS-COCO 2017 dataset.