A Dynamic Dual-Processing Object Detection Framework Inspired by the Brain's Recognition Mechanism

Minying Zhang, Tianpeng Bu, Lulu Hu; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2023, pp. 6264-6274

There are two main approaches to object detection: CNN-based and Transformer-based. The former views object detection as a dense local matching problem, while the latter sees it as a sparse global retrieval problem. Research in neuroscience has shown that the recognition decision in the brain is based on two processes, namely familiarity and recollection. Based on this biological support, we propose an efficient and effective dual-processing object detection framework. It integrates CNN- and Transformer-based detectors into a comprehensive object detection system consisting of a shared backbone, an efficient dual-stream encoder, and a dynamic dual-decoder. To better integrate local and global features, we design a search space for the CNN-Transformer dual-stream encoder to find the optimal fusion solution. To enable better coordination between the CNN- and Transformer-based decoders, we provide the dual-decoder with a selective mask. This mask dynamically chooses the more advantageous decoder for each position in the image based on high-level representation. As demonstrated by extensive experiments, our approach shows flexibility and effectiveness in prompting the mAP of the various source detectors by 3.0 3.7 without increasing FLOPs.