NLFA: A Non Local Fusion Alignment Module for Multi-Scale Feature in Object Detection

Recently, in order to pursue better detection results, more convolutional layers and deeper networks are a direction pursued by everyone. However, more and more down-sampling convolution or up-sampling operations generate feature maps of different scales, which makes it difficult to avoid the loss of detailed information of the image, and the distribution of different scales features will be misaligned. In particular, the loss and dislocation of the target boundary information will affect the features learned by the model and reduce the accuracy. This paper proposes a feature alignment method based on non-local idea, and designed two modules—Non Local Align Module (NLA) and Channel Fusion Augment Module (CFA). At the same time, the neighborhood calculation algorithm is also designed for it, which strengthens the binding force on the calculation of boundary information. These two modules can be easily embedded into the current mainstream object detection network to improve the detection effect of the model. Compared to the previous model, the network using our NLA module and CFA module achieves better results than the original model.