DLMFCOS: Efficient Dual-Path Lightweight Module for Fully Convolutional Object Detection

Recent advances in convolutional neural network (CNN)-based object detection have a trade-off between accuracy and computational cost in various industrial tasks and essential consideration. However, the fully convolutional one-stage detector (FCOS) demonstrates low accuracy compared with its computational costs owing to the loss of low-level information. Therefore, we propose a module called a dual-path lightweight module (DLM) that efficiently utilizes low-level information. In addition, we propose a DLMFCOS based on DLM to achieve an optimal trade-off between computational cost and detection accuracy. Our network minimizes feature loss by extracting spatial and channel information in parallel and implementing a bottom-up feature pyramid network that improves low-level information detection. Additionally, the structure of the detection head is improved to minimize the computational cost. The proposed method was trained and evaluated by fine-tuning parameters through experiments and using public datasets PASCAL VOC 07 and MS COCO 2017 datasets. The average precision (AP) metric is used for our quantitative evaluation matrix for detection performance, and our model achieves an average 1.5% accuracy improvement at about 33.85% lower computational cost on each dataset than the conventional method. Finally, the efficiency of the proposed method is verified by comparing the proposed method with the conventional method through an ablation study