EfficientDet is a family of scalable and efficient object detection models introduced by Google researchers in 2019[1][3]. It builds upon the success of EfficientNet as a backbone and introduces several key innovations to improve efficiency and accuracy[4].
The main components of EfficientDet include:
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EfficientNet backbone: Utilizes the EfficientNet architecture as the feature extractor, which provides a good balance of accuracy and efficiency[2].
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Bidirectional Feature Pyramid Network (BiFPN): A novel feature fusion technique that allows easy and fast multi-scale feature fusion[1][3]. It improves on traditional Feature Pyramid Networks by adding cross-scale connections and weighted feature fusion.
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Compound scaling: A method that uniformly scales the resolution, depth, and width of the backbone, feature network, and box/class prediction networks simultaneously[1][4]. This allows the model to be scaled up or down efficiently to meet different resource constraints.
EfficientDet models range from D0 to D7, with increasing model size and computational requirements[4]. The smallest model, EfficientDet-D0, has only 3.9M parameters and can run at 30ms per inference, making it suitable for mobile and edge devices[2]. At the other end of the spectrum, EfficientDet-D7 achieves state-of-the-art performance on the COCO dataset with 52.2 AP, while using significantly fewer parameters and FLOPs compared to previous top-performing models[1][3].
Key advantages of EfficientDet include:
- Improved accuracy-efficiency trade-off compared to previous object detection models[1][3]
- Scalability across a wide range of resource constraints[4]
- Faster inference on both GPU and CPU compared to models with similar accuracy[3]
EfficientDet has shown promising results not only in object detection but also in other computer vision tasks like semantic segmentation[3]. Its efficiency and scalability make it a valuable tool for various real-world applications, from mobile devices to large-scale cloud deployments.
Further Reading
1. [1911.09070] EfficientDet: Scalable and Efficient Object Detection
2. EfficientDet Object Detection Model: What is, How to Use
3. https://openaccess.thecvf.com/content_CVPR_2020/papers/Tan_EfficientDet_Scalable_and_Efficient_Object_Detection_CVPR_2020_paper.pdf
4. Google’s EfficientDet: An Overview | by Harpal Sahota | Towards Data Science
5. EfficientDet: Towards Scalable and Efficient Object Detection