MFR-CNN: Incorporating Multi-Scale Features and Global Information for Traffic Object Detection

Object detection plays an important role in intelligent transportation systems and intelligent vehicles. Although the topic of object detection has been studied for decades, it is still challenging to accurately detect objects under complex scenarios. The contributing factors for challenges include diversified object and background appearance, motion blur, adverse weather conditions, and complex interactions among objects. In this paper, we propose a new convolutional neural network (CNN) model for traffic object detection, by using multi-scale local and global feature representation (MFR). The proposed model consists of two components: a region proposal network that generates candidate object regions and an object detection network that incorporates multi-scale features and global information, namely MFR-CNN. These two components are jointly optimized. Once the system is trained, it can detect real-world traffic objects accurately, especially small objects and heavily occluded objects. We evaluate the proposed method on four benchmark datasets, achieving consistent improvements over the state of the art.