Multi-Scale Feature Selective Matching Network for Object Detection

Numerous deep learning-based object detection methods have achieved excellent performance. However, the performance on small-size object detection and positive and negative sample imbalance problems is not satisfactory. We propose a multi-scale feature selective matching network (MFSMNet) to improve the performance of small-size object detection and alleviate the positive and negative sample imbalance problems. First, we construct a multi-scale semantic enhancement module (MSEM) to compensate for the information loss of small-sized targets during down-sampling by obtaining richer semantic information from features at multiple scales. Then, we design the anchor selective matching (ASM) strategy to alleviate the training dominated by negative samples caused by the imbalance of positive and negative samples, which converts the offset values of the localization branch output in the detection head into localization scores and reduces negative samples by discarding low-quality anchors. Finally, a series of quantitative and qualitative experiments on the Microsoft COCO 2017 and PASCAL VOC 2007 + 2012 datasets show that our method is competitive compared to nine other representative methods. MFSMNet runs on a GeForce RTX 3090.