Multibranch Attention Mechanism Based on Channel and Spatial Attention Fusion

Recently, it has been demonstrated that the performance of an object detection network can be improved by embedding an attention module into it. In this work, we propose a lightweight and effective attention mechanism named multibranch attention (M3Att). For the input feature map, our M3Att first uses the grouped convolutional layer with a pyramid structure for feature extraction, and then calculates channel attention and spatial attention simultaneously and fuses them to obtain more complementary features. It is a “plug and play” module that can be easily added to the object detection network and significantly improves the performance of the object detection network with a small increase in parameters. We demonstrate the effectiveness of M3Att on various challenging object detection tasks, including PASCAL VOC2007, PASCAL VOC2012, KITTI, and Zhanjiang Underwater Robot Competition. The experimental results show that this method dramatically improves the object detection effect, especially for the PASCAL VOC2007, and the mapping index of the original network increased by 4.93% when embedded in the YOLOV4 (You Only Look Once v4) network.