Object detection algorithms require compact structures, reasonable probability interpretability, and strong detection ability for small targets. However, mainstream second-order object detectors lack reasonable probability interpretability, have structural redundancy, and cannot fully utilize information from each branch of the first stage. Non-local attention can improve sensitivity to small targets, but most of them are limited to a single scale. To address these issues, we propose PNANet, a two-stage object detector with a probability interpretable framework. We propose a robust proposal generator as the first stage of the network and use cascade RCNN as the second stage. We also propose a pyramid non-local attention module that breaks the scale constraint and improves overall performance, especially in small target detection. Our algorithm can be used for instance segmentation after adding a simple segmentation head. Testing on COCO and Pascal VOC datasets as well as practical applications demonstrated good results in both object detection and instance segmentation tasks.
Keywords: object detection; probabilistic two-stage detector; pyramid non-local attention; robust proposal generator.