CNN-transformer mixed model for object detection

TL;DR

This paper introduces a CNN-transformer hybrid model for object detection that fuses local and global features to improve accuracy while reducing computational costs, demonstrating significant performance gains on standard datasets.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel convolutional module with a transformer that enhances feature extraction and detection accuracy, integrated into YOLOv5n, with promising experimental results.

Findings

mAP improved by 1.7% on COCO dataset

Achieved 81% accuracy on Pascal VOC with fewer parameters

Model outperforms Faster R-CNN with ResNet-101 in accuracy

Abstract

Object detection, one of the three main tasks of computer vision, has been used in various applications. The main process is to use deep neural networks to extract the features of an image and then use the features to identify the class and location of an object. Therefore, the main direction to improve the accuracy of object detection tasks is to improve the neural network to extract features better. In this paper, I propose a convolutional module with a transformer[1], which aims to improve the recognition accuracy of the model by fusing the detailed features extracted by CNN[2] with the global features extracted by a transformer and significantly reduce the computational effort of the transformer module by deflating the feature mAP. The main execution steps are convolutional downsampling to reduce the feature map size, then self-attention calculation and upsampling, and finally concatenation with the initial input. In the experimental part, after splicing the block to the end of YOLOv5n[3] and training 300 epochs on the coco dataset, the mAP improved by 1.7% compared with the previous YOLOv5n, and the mAP curve did not show any saturation phenomenon, so there is still potential for improvement. After 100 rounds of training on the Pascal VOC dataset, the accuracy of the results reached 81%, which is 4.6 better than the faster RCNN[4] using resnet101[5] as the backbone, but the number of parameters is less than one-twentieth of it.