Parallel Feature Pyramid Network for Object Detection

Recently developed object detectors employ a convolutional neural network (CNN) by gradually increasing the number of feature layers with a pyramidal shape instead of using a featurized image pyramid. However, the different abstraction levels of CNN feature layers often limit the detection performance, especially on small objects. To overcome this limitation, we propose a CNN-based object detection architecture, referred to as a parallel feature pyramid (FP) network (PFPNet), where the FP is constructed by widening the network width instead of increasing the network depth. First, we adopt spatial pyramid pooling and some additional feature transformations to generate a pool of feature maps with different sizes. In PFPNet, the additional feature transformation is performed in parallel, which yields the feature maps with similar levels of semantic abstraction across the scales. We then resize the elements of the feature pool to a uniform size and aggregate their contextual information to generate each level of the final FP. The experimental results confirmed that PFPNet increases the performance of the latest version of the single-shot multi-box detector (SSD) by mAP of 6.4% AP and especially, 7.8% AP _small on the MS-COCO dataset.