Excavating RoI Attention for Underwater Object Detection

Abstract: Self-attention is one of the most successful designs in deep learning, which calculates the similarity of different tokens and reconstructs the feature based on the attention matrix. Originally designed for NLP, self-attention is also popular in computer vision, and can be categorized into pixel-level attention and patch-level attention. In object detection, RoI features can be seen as patches from base feature maps. This paper aims to apply the attention module to RoI features to improve performance. Instead of employing an original self-attention module, we choose the external attention module, a modified self-attention with reduced parameters. With the proposed double head structure and the Positional Encoding module, our method can achieve promising performance in object detection. The comprehensive experiments show that it achieves promising performance, especially in the underwater object detection dataset. The code will be avaiable in: https://github.com/zsyasd/Excavating-RoI-Attention-for-Underwater-Object-Detection