DetNet: A Backbone network for Object Detection

TL;DR

DetNet is a new backbone network tailored for object detection that maintains high spatial resolution in deeper layers, leading to improved detection and segmentation performance on MSCOCO.

Contribution

The paper introduces DetNet, a backbone specifically designed for object detection, incorporating extra stages and high spatial resolution to enhance detection accuracy.

Findings

Achieved state-of-the-art results on MSCOCO for detection and segmentation.

DetNet outperforms traditional classification backbones in object detection tasks.

Maintains high spatial resolution in deeper layers for better localization.

Abstract

Recent CNN based object detectors, no matter one-stage methods like YOLO, SSD, and RetinaNe or two-stage detectors like Faster R-CNN, R-FCN and FPN are usually trying to directly finetune from ImageNet pre-trained models designed for image classification. There has been little work discussing on the backbone feature extractor specifically designed for the object detection. More importantly, there are several differences between the tasks of image classification and object detection. 1. Recent object detectors like FPN and RetinaNet usually involve extra stages against the task of image classification to handle the objects with various scales. 2. Object detection not only needs to recognize the category of the object instances but also spatially locate the position. Large downsampling factor brings large valid receptive field, which is good for image classification but compromises the object location ability. Due to the gap between the image classification and object detection, we propose DetNet in this paper, which is a novel backbone network specifically designed for object detection. Moreover, DetNet includes the extra stages against traditional backbone network for image classification, while maintains high spatial resolution in deeper layers. Without any bells and whistles, state-of-the-art results have been obtained for both object detection and instance segmentation on the MSCOCO benchmark based on our DetNet~(4.8G FLOPs) backbone. The code will be released for the reproduction.