Federated Object Detection: Optimizing Object Detection Model with Federated Learning

Abstract

Object detection with deep learning model has achieved good results in many fields, but in some fields that think highly of data privacy, such as medical care, its applications is greatly limited by data. And Federated Learning allows clients to train a model together, while leaving their data in the local, without sharing with the server or other clients. Using the methods of Federated Learning, such as Federated Averaging(FedAvg), to train models can provide privacy, security benefits. Nonetheless, there is little experiment applying Federated Learning algorithms to train the model with a large number of parameters, such as deep learning object detection model. With non-IID data, the accuracy of object detection model trained by FedAvg reduces significantly, and need more rounds to coverage. In this work, we use Kullback-Leibler divergence(KLD) measure the weights divergence between different model trained with non-IID data. And we propose a useful scheme to improve FedAvg based Abnormal Weights Supression, reducing the influence of the weights divergence caused by non-IID and unbalanced data. As a representative of object detection, we choose Single Shot MultiBox Detector(SSD) as the base model. The results of the experiments show that the Mean Average Precision(mAP) get obvious improvement in Pascal VOC 2007 test dataset.