TE-YOLOF: Tiny and efficient YOLOF for blood cell detection

Blood cell detection in microscopic images is an essential branch of medical image processing research. Since disease detection based on manual checking of blood cells is time-consuming and full of errors, testing of blood cells using object detectors with Deep Convolutional Neural Network can be regarded as a feasible solution. In this work, an object detector based on YOLOF has been proposed to detect blood cell objects such as red blood cells, white blood cells and platelets. This object detector is called TE-YOLOF, Tiny and Efficient YOLOF, and it is a One-Stage detector using dilated encoder to extract information from single-level feature maps. For increasing efficiency and flexibility, the EfficientNet Convolutional Neural Network is utilized as the backbone for the proposed object detector. Furthermore, the Depthwise Separable Convolution is applied to enhance the performance and minimize the parameters of the network. In addition, the Mish activation function is employed to increase the precision. Extensive experiments on the BCCD dataset prove the effectiveness of the proposed model, which is more efficient than other existing studies for blood cell detection.