Att-FPA: Boosting Feature Perceive for Object Detection

The deep convolutional networks have a great success in vision classification tasks. For object detection, tasks are divided into two subtasks: localization and classification. The detectors scan the whole image to generate object proposals relying on the predefined anchors or points, then classify and fine trim the proposals. The localization task plays an important role in object detection. The foreground objects and background can be easily confused under complex scenes in the existing approaches. Thus, the localization task results in a bad influence on the performance of classification problems. In order to enhance the object localization perceived, a novel method called Attentional Feature Perceive and Augmentation (Att-FPA) is constructed, which devotes setting up a feature dual perceive for localization and classification. Firstly, an attention mask branch (with an attention mask) is imported to check out if the detecting area is the background or containing one or more objects. By maintaining the feature representation of background, the attention mask is employed to strengthen the feature representation of foreground objects, which significantly enhances the localization perceived ability of objects. Moreover, Att-FPA supplies a novel way on feature re-extraction and augmentation, which further promotes the performance significantly. In the task of Ms COCO object detection, Att-FPA achieves an outstanding promotion(3.0+ mAP) than baseline (Faster-Rcnn) method. It establishes a new efficient method of feature representation, which outperforms the state-of-the-art models in object detection.