Bridging Multi-Scale Context-Aware Representation for Object Detection

Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) exploits multi-scale fusion representation to deal with scale variances in object detection. However, it ignores the context information gap across different levels. In this paper, we develop a plug-and-play detector, the multi-scale context-aware feature pyramid network to unleash the power of feature pyramid representation. Based on the dilated feature map at the highest level of the backbone, we propose the cross-scale context aggregation block to make full use of context information in the feature pyramid. Moreover, we extract discriminative features among different levels by the adaptive context aggregation block for robust object detection. Comprehensive experiments on MS-COCO demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed network, where about 1.0~3.0 AP improvements are achieved compared with existing FPN-based methods. In addition, we also conduct extensive experiments on pixel-level prediction tasks, i.e., instance segmentation, semantic segmentation, and panoptic segmentation, which further verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.