Deep Transfer Learning Based Multiway Feature Pyramid Network for Object Detection in Images

Object detection is being widely used in many fields, and therefore, the demand for more accurate and fast methods for object detection is also increasing. In this paper, we propose a method for object detection in digital images that is more accurate and faster. The proposed model is based on Single-Stage Multibox Detector (SSD) architecture. This method creates many anchor boxes of various aspect ratios based on the backbone network and multiscale feature network and calculates the classes and balances of the anchor boxes to detect objects at various scales. Instead of the VGG16-based deep transfer learning model in SSD, we have used a more efficient base network, i.e., EfficientNet. Detection of objects of different sizes is still an inspiring task. We have used Multiway Feature Pyramid Network (MFPN) to solve this problem. The input to the base network is given to MFPN, and then, the fused features are given to bounding box prediction and class prediction networks. Softer-NMS is applied instead of NMS in SSD to reduce the number of bounding boxes gently. The proposed method is validated on MSCOCO 2017, PASCAL VOC 2007, and PASCAL VOC 2012 datasets and compared to existing state-of-the-art techniques. Our method shows better detection quality in terms of mean Average Precision (mAP).