DIGCN: A Dynamic Interaction Graph Convolutional Network Based on Learnable Proposals for Object Detection

Abstract

We propose a Dynamic Interaction Graph Convolutional Network (DIGCN), an image object detection method based on learnable proposals and GCN. Existing object detection methods usually work on dense candidates, resulting in redundant and near-duplicate results. Meanwhile, non-maximum suppression post-processing operations are required to eliminate negative effects, which increases the computational complexity. Although the existing sparse detector avoids cumbersome post-processing operations, it ignores the potential relationship between objects and proposals, which hinders detection accuracy improvement. Therefore, we propose a dynamic interaction GCN module in the DIGCN, which performs dynamic interaction and relational modeling on the proposal boxes and proposal features to improve the object detection accuracy. In addition, we introduce a learnable proposal method with a sparse set of learned object proposals to eliminate a huge number of hand-designed object candidates, avoiding complicated tasks such as object candidate design and many-to-one label assignment, and reducing object detection model complexity to a certain extent. DIGCN demonstrates accuracy and run-time performance on par with the well-established and highly optimized detector baselines on the challenging COCO dataset, e.g. with the ResNet-101FPN as the backbone our method attains the accuracy of 46.5 AP while processing 13 frames per second. Our work provides a new method for object detection research.