DSIC: Dynamic Sample-Individualized Connector for Multi-Scale Object Detection

Although object detection has reached a milestone recently, the scale variation is still the key challenge. Integrating multilevel features is presented to alleviate the problems, like Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) and its improvements. However, the specifically designed architectures and fixed data flow paths of these methods are not flexible for feature fusion, especially when fed with various samples. To overcome the limitations, we propose a Dynamic Sample-Individualized Connector (DSIC) for multi-scale object detection, which dynamically adjusts network connections to fit different samples. In particular, DSIC consists of two components: Intra-scale Selection Gate (ISG) and Cross-scale Selection Gate (CSG). With the help of the presented gate operator, ISG adaptively extracts proper multi-level features from backbone as the inputs of feature integration. CSG automatically activates informative data flow paths based on the extracted multi-level features. These two components are both plug-and-play and can be embedded in any backbone. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the- arts.