Tripartite Feature Enhanced Pyramid Network for Dense Prediction

Learning pyramidal feature representations is important for many dense prediction tasks (e.g., object detection, semantic segmentation) that demand multi-scale visual understanding. Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) is a well-known architecture for multi-scale feature learning, however, intrinsic weaknesses in feature extraction and fusion impede the production of informative features. This work addresses the weaknesses of FPN through a novel tripartite feature enhanced pyramid network (TFPN), with three distinct and effective designs. First, we develop a feature reference module with lateral connections to adaptively extract bottom-up features with richer details for feature pyramid construction. Second, we design a feature calibration module between adjacent layers that calibrates the upsampled features to be spatially aligned, allowing for feature fusion with accurate correspondences. Third, we introduce a feature feedback module in FPN, which creates a communication channel from the feature pyramid back to the bottom-up backbone and doubles the encoding capacity, enabling the entire architecture to generate incrementally more powerful representations. The TFPN is extensively evaluated over four popular dense prediction tasks, i.e., object detection, instance segmentation, panoptic segmentation, and semantic segmentation. The results demonstrate that TFPN consistently and significantly outperforms the vanilla FPN. Our code is available at https://github.com/jamesliang819.