MSFM: Multi-Scale Fusion Module for Object Detection

Feature fusion is beneficial to object detection tasks in two folds. On one hand, detail and position information can be combined with semantic information when high and low-resolution features from shallow and deep layers are fused. On the other hand, objects can be detected in different scales, which improves the robustness of the framework. In this work, we present a Multi-Scale Fusion Module (MSFM) that extracts both detail and semantical information from a single input but at different scales within the same layer. Specifically, the input of the module will be resized into different scales on which position and semantic information will be processed, and then they will be rescaled back and combined with the module input. The MSFM is lightweight and can be used as a drop-in layer to many existing object detection frameworks. Experiments show that MSFM can bring +2.5% mAP improvement with only 2.4M extra parameters on Faster R-CNN with ResNet-50 FPN backbone on COCO Object Detection minival set, outperforming that with ResNet-101 FPN backbone without the module which obtains +2.0% mAP with 19.0M extra parameters. The best resulting model achieves a 45.7% mAP on test-dev set. Code will be available.