Progressive Semi-Decoupled Detector for Accurate Object Detection

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Inconsistent accuracy between classification and localization tasks is a common challenge in modern object detection. Task decoupling, which employs distinct features or labeling strategies for each task, is a widely used approach to address this issue. Although it has led to noteworthy advancements, this approach is insufficient as it neglects task interdependence and lacks an explicit consistency constraint. To bridge this gap, this paper proposes the Progressive Semi-Decoupled Detector (ProSDD) to enhance both classification and localization accuracy. Specifically, a new detection head is designed that incorporates feature suppression and enhancement mechanism (FSEM) and bidirectional interaction module (BIM). Compared with the decoupled head, it not only filters out task-irrelevant information and enhances task-related information, but also avoids excessive decoupling at the feature level. Moreover, both FSEM and BIM are used multiple times, thus forming a progressive semi-decoupled head. Then, a novel consistency loss is proposed and integrated into the loss function of object detection, ensuring harmonic performance in classification and localization. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed ProSDD effectively alleviates inconsistent accuracy and achieves high-quality object detection. Taking the pretrained ResNet-50 as the backbone, ProSDD achieves a remarkable 43.3 AP on the MS COCO dataset, surpassing contemporary state-of-the-art detectors by a substantial margin under the equivalent configurations. Code is available at <uri xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://github.com/HB-X/ProSDD</uri>.