Fast object detector with center localization confidence based on FCOS for environment perception in urban traffic scene

Abstract

Environment perception on urban roads is one of the most important tasks in Automatic Driving System, because object detection is necessary in identifying and localizing cars and pedestrians. However, the accuracy and inference speed are still far away from satisfying, and the problem of missed detection occurs frequently. To address the problems, this paper first uniformly scales all dimensions of depth, width, and resolution in feature extraction module, and then fuses the semantic information in bidirectional cross-scale connections, which extract more significant features and detect objects of various scales. To decrease the undetected rate of small objects, this paper further introduces an IoU-based center localization confidence, which predicts centerness and the distance between the center of predicted box and the center of the ground-truth box, so that the predicted point approaches the center of an object. The experimental results on Cityscapes show that the proposed detector brings an improvement of 6.5% Bbox mAP and reaches an inference speed of 36.6 FPS. Compared with the other widely-used detectors such as Cascade R-CNN, FCOS, and YOLOX, it has obvious advantages in both precision and real-time performance. With additional ticks, the detection precision can be further improved by 4.4%. The proposed detector can accurately and quickly identify and localize objects, which is beneficial for the safety of self-driving cars.