Feature Selective Small Object Detection via Knowledge-based Recurrent Attentive Neural Network

At present, the performance of deep neural network in general object detection is comparable to or even surpasses that of human beings. However, due to the limitations of deep learning itself, the small proportion of feature pixels, and the occurence of blur and occlusion, the detection of small objects in complex scenes is still an open question. But we can not deny that real-time and accurate object detection is fundamental to automatic perception and subsequent perception-based decision-making and planning tasks of autonomous driving. Considering the characteristics of small objects in autonomous driving scene, we proposed a novel method named KB-RANN, which based on domain knowledge, intuitive experience and feature attentive selection. It can focus on particular parts of image features, and then it tries to stress the importance of these features and strengthenes the learning parameters of them. Our comparative experiments on KITTI and COCO datasets show that our proposed method can achieve considerable results both in speed and accuracy, and can improve the effect of small object detection through self-selection of important features and continuous enhancement of proposed method, and deployed it in our self-developed autonomous driving car.