MFIL-FCOS: A Multi-Scale Fusion and Interactive Learning Method for 2D Object Detection and Remote Sensing Image Detection

Object detection is dedicated to finding objects in an image and estimate their categories and locations. Recently, object detection algorithms suffer from a loss of semantic information in the deeper feature maps due to the deepening of the backbone network. For example, when using complex backbone networks, existing feature fusion methods cannot fuse information from different layers effectively. In addition, anchor-free object detection methods fail to accurately predict the same object due to the different learning mechanisms of the regression and centrality of the prediction branches. To address the above problem, we propose a multi-scale fusion and interactive learning method for fully convolutional one-stage anchor-free object detection, called MFIL-FCOS. Specifically, we designed a multi-scale fusion module to address the problem of local semantic information loss in high-level feature maps which strengthen the ability of feature extraction by enhancing the local information of low-level features and fusing the rich semantic information of high-level features. Furthermore, we propose an interactive learning module to increase the interactivity and more accurate predictions by generating a centrality-position weight adjustment regression task and a centrality prediction task. Following these strategic improvements, we conduct extensive experiments on the COCO and DIOR datasets, demonstrating its superior capabilities in 2D object detection tasks and remote sensing image detection, even under challenging conditions.