CE-FPN: Enhancing Channel Information for Object Detection

Feature pyramid network (FPN) has been an effective framework to extract multi-scale features in object detection. However, current FPN-based methods mostly suffer from the intrinsic flaw of channel reduction, which brings about the loss of semantical information. And the miscellaneous fused feature maps may cause serious aliasing effects. In this paper, we present a novel channel enhancement feature pyramid network (CE-FPN) with three simple yet effective modules to alleviate these problems. Specifically, inspired by sub-pixel convolution, we propose a sub-pixel skip fusion method to perform both channel enhancement and upsampling. Instead of the original 1x1 convolution and linear upsampling, it mitigates the information loss due to channel reduction. Then we propose a sub-pixel context enhancement module for extracting more feature representations, which is superior to other context methods due to the utilization of rich channel information by sub-pixel convolution. Furthermore, a channel attention guided module is introduced to optimize the final integrated features on each level, which alleviates the aliasing effect only with a few computational burdens. Our experiments show that CE-FPN achieves competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art FPN-based detectors on MS COCO benchmark.