CBNet: A Novel Composite Backbone Network Architecture for Object Detection

Authors

  • Yudong Liu Peking University
  • Yongtao Wang Peking University
  • Siwei Wang Peking University
  • Tingting Liang Peking University
  • Qijie Zhao Peking University
  • Zhi Tang Peking University
  • Haibin Ling Stony Brook University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v34i07.6834

Abstract

In existing CNN based detectors, the backbone network is a very important component for basic feature1 extraction, and the performance of the detectors highly depends on it. In this paper, we aim to achieve better detection performance by building a more powerful backbone from existing ones like ResNet and ResNeXt. Specifically, we propose a novel strategy for assembling multiple identical backbones by composite connections between the adjacent backbones, to form a more powerful backbone named Composite Backbone Network (CBNet). In this way, CBNet iteratively feeds the output features of the previous backbone, namely high-level features, as part of input features to the succeeding backbone, in a stage-by-stage fashion, and finally the feature maps of the last backbone (named Lead Backbone) are used for object detection. We show that CBNet can be very easily integrated into most state-of-the-art detectors and significantly improve their performances. For example, it boosts the mAP of FPN, Mask R-CNN and Cascade R-CNN on the COCO dataset by about 1.5 to 3.0 points. Moreover, experimental results show that the instance segmentation results can be improved as well. Specifically, by simply integrating the proposed CBNet into the baseline detector Cascade Mask R-CNN, we achieve a new state-of-the-art result on COCO dataset (mAP of 53.3) with a single model, which demonstrates great effectiveness of the proposed CBNet architecture. Code will be made available at https://github.com/PKUbahuangliuhe/CBNet.

Downloads

Published

2020-04-03

How to Cite

Liu, Y., Wang, Y., Wang, S., Liang, T., Zhao, Q., Tang, Z., & Ling, H. (2020). CBNet: A Novel Composite Backbone Network Architecture for Object Detection. Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 34(07), 11653-11660. https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v34i07.6834

Issue

Section

AAAI Technical Track: Vision