Previewer for multi-scale object detector

Abstract

Most multi-scale detectors face a challenge of small-size false positives due to the inadequacy of low-level features, which have small receptive field sizes and weak semantic capabilities. This paper demonstrates independent predictions from different feature layers on the same region is beneficial for reducing false positives. We propose a novel light-weight previewer block, which previews the objectness probability for the potential regression region of each prior box, using the stronger features with larger receptive fields and more contextual information for better predictions. This previewer block is generic and can be easily implemented in multi-scale detectors, such as SSD, RFBNet and MS-CNN. Extensive experiments are conducted on PASCAL VOC and KITTI pedestrian benchmark to show the superiority of the proposed method.