Inception Single Shot MultiBox Detector for object detection

In the current object detection field, one of the fastest algorithms is the Single Shot Multi-Box Detector (SSD), which uses a single convolutional neural network to detect the object in an image. Although SSD is fast, there is a big gap compared with the state-of-the-art on mAP. In this paper, we propose a method to improve SSD algorithm to increase its classification accuracy without affecting its speed. We adopt the Inception block to replace the extra layers in SSD, and call this method Inception SSD (I-SSD). The proposed network can catch more information without increasing the complexity. In addition, we use the batch-normalization (BN) and the residual structure in our I-SSD network architecture. Besides, we propose an improved non-maximum suppression method to overcome its deficiency on the expression ability of the model. The proposed I-SSD algorithm achieves 78.6% mAP on the Pascal VOC2007 test, which outperforms SSD algorithm while maintaining its time performance. We also construct an Outdoor Object Detection (OOD) dataset to testify the effectiveness of the proposed I-SSD on the platform of unmanned vehicles.