Small object detection combining attention mechanism and a novel FPN

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Chen, Junying^a | Liu, Shipeng^a | Zhao, Liang^{a; b; *} | Chen, Dengfeng^a | Zhang, Weihua^c

Affiliations: [a] School of Information and Control Engineering, Xi’an University of Architecture and Technology, Xi’an Shaanxi, China | [b] Shaanxi Key Laboratory of Geotechnical and Underground Space Engineering, Xi’an University of Architecture and Technology | [c] School of Arts, Xi’an University of Architecture and Technology, Xi’an Shaanxi, China

Correspondence: [*] Corresponding author. Liang Zhao, E-mail: [email protected].

Abstract: Since small objects occupy less pixels in the image and are difficult to recognize. Small object detection has always been a research difficulty in the field of computer vision. Aiming at the problems of low sensitivity and poor detection performance of YOLOv3 for small objects. AFYOLO, which is more sensitive to small objects detection was proposed in this paper. Firstly, the DenseNet module is introduced into the low-level layers of backbone to enhance the transmission ability of objects information. At the same time, a new mechanism combining channel attention and spatial attention is introduced to improve the feature extraction ability of the backbone. Secondly, a new feature pyramid network (FPN) is proposed to better obtain the features of small objects. Finally, ablation studies on ImageNet classification task and MS-COCO object detection task verify the effectiveness of the proposed attention module and FPN. The results on Wider Face datasets show that the AP of the proposed method is 11.89%higher than that of YOLOv3 and 8.59%higher than that of YOLOv4. All of results show that AFYOLO has better ability for small object detection.

Keywords: Small object detection, YOLOv3, DenseNet, attention mechanism, FPN

DOI: 10.3233/JIFS-211905

Journal: Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems, vol. 42, no. 4, pp. 3691-3703, 2022