Pixel-Semantic Revising of Position: One-Stage Object Detector with Shared Encoder-Decoder

Recently, many methods have been proposed for object detection. However, they cannot detect objects by semantic features, adaptively. According to channel and spatial attention mechanisms, we mainly analyze that different methods detect objects adaptively. Some state-of-the-art detectors combine different feature pyramids with many mechanisms. However, they require more cost. This work addresses that by an anchor-free detector with shared encoder-decoder with attention mechanism, extracting shared features. We consider features of different levels from backbone (e.g., ResNet-50) as the basis features. Then, we feed the features into a simple module, followed by a detector header to detect objects. Meantime, we use the semantic features to revise geometric locations, and the detector is a pixel-semantic revising of position. More importantly, this work analyzes the impact of different pooling strategies (e.g., mean, maximum or minimum) on multi-scale objects, and finds the minimum pooling can improve detection performance on small objects better. Compared with state-of-the-art MNC based on ResNet-101 for the standard MSCOCO 2014 baseline, our method improves detection AP of 3.8%.