An object detection approach with residual feature fusion and second-order term attention mechanism

Automatically detecting and locating remote occlusion small objects from the images of complex traffic environments is a valuable and challenging research. Since the boundary box location is not sufficiently accurate and it is difficult to distinguish overlapping and occluded objects, the authors propose a network model with a second-order term attention mechanism and occlusion loss. First, the backbone network is built on CSPDarkNet53. Then a method is designed for the feature extraction network based on an item-wise attention mechanism, which uses the filtered weighted feature vector to replace the original residual fusion and adds a second-order term to reduce the information loss in the process of fusion and accelerate the convergence of the model. Finally, an objected occlusion regression loss function is studied to reduce the problems of missed detections caused by dense objects. Sufficient experimental results demonstrate that the authors’ method achieved state-of-the-art performance without reducing the detection speed. The mAP@.5 of the method is 85.8% on the Foggy_cityscapes dataset and the mAP@.5 of the method is 97.8% on the KITTI dataset.