POD: Practical Object Detection With Scale-Sensitive Network

Scale-sensitive object detection remains a challenging task, where most of the existing methods not learn it explicitly and not robust to scale variance. In addition, the most existing methods are less efficient during training or slow during inference, which are not friendly to real-time application. In this paper, we propose a practical object detection with scale-sensitive network.Our method first predicts a global continuous scale ,which shared by all position, for each convolution filter of each network stage. To effectively learn the scale, we average the spatial features and distill the scale from channels. For fast-deployment, we propose a scale decomposition method that transfers the robust fractional scale into combinations of fixed integral scales for each convolution filter, which exploit the dilated convolution. We demonstrate it on one-stage and two-stage algorithm under almost different configure. For practical application, training of our method is of efficiency and simplicity which gets rid of complex data sampling or optimize strategy. During testing, the proposed method requires no extra operation and is very friendly to hardware acceleration like TensorRT and TVM.On the COCO test-dev, our model could achieve a 41.5mAP on one-stage detector and 42.1 mAP on two-stage detectors based on ResNet-101, outperforming baselines by 2.4 and 2.1 respectively without extra FLOPS.