Light-Net: Lightweight Object Detector

Currently, object detectors based on CNN, such as RetinaNet, Faster-RCNN, CornerNet series, can achieve good performance, but have some common drawbacks, like large calculation cost, high model complexity and slow detection speed. In this paper, a new lightweight object detector is proposed, which adopted a density-based approach to merge the real boxes. To reduce calculation cost and improve detection speed, the tactic of multi-scale output is adopted to predict objects of different sizes with features of different scales. Furthermore, a new lightweight network model is proposed, which can show better performance in computation, FPS, and model complexity. Meanwhile, the separation of convolution is used to improve the basic convolution layer, which can achieve better results under the same number of filters. In the experiments, we verified the capability of our methods based on ablation experiment and model evaluation, which demonstrates the superiority of our method. Moreover, we have also conducted deep network and multichannel experiments on MS-COCO2014 datasets and achieved 20.9% mAP performance.