Object detection algorithm based on feature enhancement

Abstract

Recently, many excellent algorithms have made great progress in object detection, but there are also problems in these algorithms’ performance on targets of different sizes, and in particular in small object detection. Aiming at the problem of insufficient feature representation by the feature extractor, in this paper we propose a lightweight algorithm to improve feature extraction. The algorithm includes three modules. First, considering that the shallow features in feature extraction contain much background noise, in this paper we design a multi-level feedback propagation model based on a Gaussian high-pass filter. The shallow layers are enhanced using the filter and then back-propagated to add the upper shallow layer features and obtain new shallow layer features. This process is performed on the newly generated shallow layer for n iterations, which is beneficial for enhancing targets in the foreground area and suppressing background noise. Second, we form a stacked dilated convolution module with different dilation rates to cover the entire deep feature layer densely, which enlarges the receptive field and enriches the contextual information. Finally, we build a multi-scale fusion module to fuse the above-mentioned enhanced shallow and deep features to obtain output features with powerful representational ability for detection tasks. In addition, the model is easily embedded into existing approaches to enhance their performance. We build the model on the VGG-16 and ResNet-50 backbones and successfully applied it on Darknet-19 and Darknet-53 to verify its effectiveness and stability. The experiments on the COCO dataset prove that the proposed algorithm outperforms the state-of-art methods, with a mean average precision improvement reaching 2% on average. The effect is remarkable on small targets and complex backgrounds. Furthermore, it does not affect the detection speed significantly, so real time detection requirements can still be met.