AugFPN: Improving Multi-scale Feature Learning for Object Detection
This work addresses inefficiencies in multi-scale feature learning for object detection, offering incremental improvements for computer vision researchers and practitioners.
The paper tackles the problem of design defects in feature pyramid networks (FPN) for object detection by introducing AugFPN, which includes Consistent Supervision, Residual Feature Augmentation, and Soft RoI Selection, resulting in improvements of up to 2.3 points in Average Precision (AP) on Faster R-CNN with ResNet50.
Current state-of-the-art detectors typically exploit feature pyramid to detect objects at different scales. Among them, FPN is one of the representative works that build a feature pyramid by multi-scale features summation. However, the design defects behind prevent the multi-scale features from being fully exploited. In this paper, we begin by first analyzing the design defects of feature pyramid in FPN, and then introduce a new feature pyramid architecture named AugFPN to address these problems. Specifically, AugFPN consists of three components: Consistent Supervision, Residual Feature Augmentation, and Soft RoI Selection. AugFPN narrows the semantic gaps between features of different scales before feature fusion through Consistent Supervision. In feature fusion, ratio-invariant context information is extracted by Residual Feature Augmentation to reduce the information loss of feature map at the highest pyramid level. Finally, Soft RoI Selection is employed to learn a better RoI feature adaptively after feature fusion. By replacing FPN with AugFPN in Faster R-CNN, our models achieve 2.3 and 1.6 points higher Average Precision (AP) when using ResNet50 and MobileNet-v2 as backbone respectively. Furthermore, AugFPN improves RetinaNet by 1.6 points AP and FCOS by 0.9 points AP when using ResNet50 as backbone. Codes will be made available.