SSD Optimization Model Based on Shallow Feature Fusion

Abstract

Object detection has been an important research branch in the field of computer vision. The single-shot-detection (SSD) is an object detection model based on deep learning, which can achieve a good balance between the detection accuracy and the detection speed, but has the problem of poor recognition accuracy for small objects. To address this limitation, this paper improves the structure of the SSD feature pyramid and up-samples the shallow feature map with small object information and fuses it with the upper feature map, thus enhancing the ability of the shallow feature map to represent detailed information. In this way, not only the overall detection accuracy of the SSD is improved, but also a relatively high detection speed is maintained. The proposed model is verified by experiments on two common datasets, the Pascal VOC and MS COCO datasets. On the Pascal VOC07+12, MS COCO14, and VOC07+12+COCO datasets, the improved model achieves the mean average precision values of 80.1% (+3.3% compared with the conventional model), 49.9% (+6.8%), and 82.1% (+3.0%), respectively. Meanwhile, the proposed model can achieve the detection speed of 42.2 frames per second.