AF-EMS Detector: Improve the Multi-Scale Detection Per- formance of the Anchor-Free Detector

As a precursor step for computer vision algorithms, object detection plays an important role in various practical application scenarios. With the objects to be detected becoming more complex, the problem of multi-scale object detection has attracted more and more attention, especially in the field of remote sensing detection. Early convolutional neural network detection algorithms are mostly based on artificially preset anchor-boxes to divide different regions in the image, and then obtain the prior position of the target. However, the anchor box is difficult to set reasonably and will cause a large amount of computational redundancy, which affects the generality of the detection model obtained under fixed parameters. In the past two years, anchor-free detection algorithm has achieved remarkable development in the field of detection on natural image. However, there is no sufficient research on how to deal with multi-scale detection more effectively in anchor-free framework and use these detectors on remote sensing images. In this paper, we propose a specific-attention Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) module, which is able to generate a feature pyramid, basing on the characteristics of objects with various sizes. In addition, this pyramid suits multi-scale object detection better. Besides, a scale-aware detection head is proposed which contains a multi-receptive feature fusion module and a size-based feature compensation module. The new anchor-free detector can obtain a more effective multi-scale feature expression. Experiments on challenging datasets show that our approach performs favorably against other methods in terms of the multi-scale object detection performance.