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An improved anchor-free method for traffic scene object detection

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Abstract

Due to the low detection accuracy of most anchor-free detectors and the slow detection speed of anchor-based detectors. Therefore, to balance the detection accuracy and speed of traffic scene objects, a new anchor-free detector called FABNet is proposed in this paper. The method is mainly composed of feature pyramid fusion module (FPFM), cascade attention module (CAM), and boundary feature extraction module (BFEM). Firstly, we design a feature pyramid fusion module to generate richer semantic information. The proposal of the feature pyramid fusion module not only improves the detection accuracy of objects, but also solves the problem of detection of objects of different sizes. Secondly, the cascade attention module achieves the local representation of features by exploiting hierarchical attention, spatial attention and channel attention. The proposal of cascade attention module improves the representation ability of object detection head. Finally, to obtain more foreground information under the influence of complex background, we design a boundary feature extraction module to extract the boundary features of the object effectively. We perform sufficient experiments on three public datasets, i.e., BDD100K, PASCAL VOC, and KITTI. The results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art levels in both accuracy and speed.

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Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported in part by NSFC (61572286 and 61472220), NSFC Joint with Zhejiang Integration of Informatization and Industrializaiton under Key Project (U1609218), and the Fostering Project of Dominant Discipline a Talent Team of Shandong Province Higher Education.

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  1. School of Physics and Electronic Science, Shandong Normal University, Jinan, 250399, China

    Tonghe Ding, Kaili Feng, Yejin Yan, Yanjun Wei & Tianping Li

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  1. Tonghe Ding
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Ding, T., Feng, K., Yan, Y. et al. An improved anchor-free method for traffic scene object detection. Multimed Tools Appl 82, 34703–34724 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-023-15077-7

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