FD-SSD: An improved SSD object detection algorithm based on feature fusion and dilated convolution

Objects that occupy a small portion of an image or a frame contain fewer pixels and contains less information. This makes small object detection a challenging task in computer vision. In this paper, an improved Single Shot multi-box Detector based on feature fusion and dilated convolution (FD-SSD) is proposed to solve the problem that small objects are difficult to detect. The proposed network uses VGG-16 as the backbone network, which mainly includes a multi-layer feature fusion module and a multi-branch residual dilated convolution module. In the multi-layer feature fusion module, the last two layers of the feature map are up-sampled, and then they are concatenated at the channel level with the shallow feature map to enhance the semantic information of the shallow feature map. In the multi-branch residual dilated convolution module, three dilated convolutions with different dilated ratios based on the residual network are combined to obtain the multi-scale context information of the feature without losing the original resolution of the feature map. In addition, deformable convolution is added to each detection layer to better adapt to the shape of small objects. The proposed FD-SSD achieved 79.1% mAP and 29.7% mAP on PASCAL VOC2007 dataset and MS COCO dataset respectively. Experimental results show that FD-SSD can effectively improve the utilization of multi-scale information of small objects, thus significantly improve the effect of the small object detection. •A new multi-scale information enhancement network for small object detection is proposed.•The semantic information of the shallow feature map is improved by the muliti-layer feature fusion module. Through the multi-branch residual dilated convolution module, the original resolution of the feature map is kept and the context information of the feature map is improved. Besides, deformable convolution is used to fit the shape of small objects.•Experiments on the PASCAL VOC2007 dataset and MS COCO dataset prove the effect of the proposed network.