DWANet: Focus on Foreground Features for More Accurate Location

Object detection can locate objects in an image using bounding boxes, which can facilitate classification and image understanding, resulting in a wide range of applications. Knowing how to mine useful features from images and detect objects of different scales have become the focus for object-detection research. In this paper, considering the importance of foreground features in the process of object detection, a foreground feature extraction module, based on deformable convolution, is proposed, and the attention mechanism is integrated to suppress the interference from the background. To learn effective features, considering that different layers in a convolutional neural network have different contributions, we propose methods to learn the weights for feature fusion. Experiments on the VOC datasets and COCO datasets show that the proposed algorithm can effectively improve the object detection accuracy, which is 12.1% higher than Faster R-CNN, 1.5% higher than RefineDet, and 2.3% higher than the Hierarchical Shot Detector (HSD).