Dynamic Anchor Feature Selection for Single-Shot Object Detection

The design of anchors is critical to the performance of one-stage detectors. Recently, the anchor refinement module (ARM) has been proposed to adjust the initialization of default anchors, providing the detector a better anchor reference. However, this module brings another problem: All pixels at a feature map have the same receptive field while the anchors associated with each pixel have different positions and sizes. This discordance may lead to a less effective detector. In this paper, we present a dynamic feature selection operation to select new pixels in a feature map for each refined anchor received from the ARM. The pixels are selected based on the new anchor position and size so that the receptive filed of these pixels can fit the anchor areas well, which makes the detector, especially the regression part, much easier to optimize. Furthermore, to enhance the representation ability of selected feature pixels, we design a bidirectional feature fusion module by combining features from early and deep layers. Extensive experiments on both PASCAL VOC and COCO demonstrate the effectiveness of our dynamic anchor feature selection (DAFS) operation. For the case of high IoU threshold, our DAFS can improve the mAP by a large margin.