What is: Feature Pyramid Network?

A Feature Pyramid Network, or FPN, is a feature extractor that takes a single-scale image of an arbitrary size as input, and outputs proportionally sized feature maps at multiple levels, in a fully convolutional fashion. This process is independent of the backbone convolutional architectures. It therefore acts as a generic solution for building feature pyramids inside deep convolutional networks to be used in tasks like object detection.

The construction of the pyramid involves a bottom-up pathway and a top-down pathway.

The bottom-up pathway is the feedforward computation of the backbone ConvNet, which computes a feature hierarchy consisting of feature maps at several scales with a scaling step of 2. For the feature pyramid, one pyramid level is defined for each stage. The output of the last layer of each stage is used as a reference set of feature maps. For ResNets we use the feature activations output by each stage’s last residual block.

The top-down pathway hallucinates higher resolution features by upsampling spatially coarser, but semantically stronger, feature maps from higher pyramid levels. These features are then enhanced with features from the bottom-up pathway via lateral connections. Each lateral connection merges feature maps of the same spatial size from the bottom-up pathway and the top-down pathway. The bottom-up feature map is of lower-level semantics, but its activations are more accurately localized as it was subsampled fewer times.