SaccadeNet: A Fast and Accurate Object Detector

Object detection is an essential step towards holistic scene understanding. Most existing object detection algorithms attend to certain object areas once and then predict the object locations. However, neuroscientists have revealed that humans do not look at the scene in fixed steadiness. Instead, human eyes move around, locating informative parts to understand the object location. This active perceiving movement process is called textitsaccade. %In this paper, Inspired by such mechanism, we propose a fast and accurate object detector called textitSaccadeNet. It contains four main modules, the cenam, the coram, the atm, and the aggatt, which allows it to attend to different informative object keypoints, and predict object locations from coarse to fine. The coram~is used only during training to extract more informative corner features which brings free-lunch performance boost. On the MS COCO dataset, we achieve the performance of 40.4% mAP at 28 FPS and 30.5% mAP at 118 FPS. Among all the real-time object detectors, %that can run faster than 25 FPS, our SaccadeNet achieves the best detection performance, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed detection mechanism.