Improved CenterNet for Accurate and Fast Fitting Object Detection

Accurate and fast detection of typical fittings is the prerequisite of condition monitoring and fault diagnosis. At present, most successful fitting detectors are anchor-based, which are challenging to meet the requirements of edge deployment. In this paper, we propose a novel anchor-free method called HRM-CenterNet. Firstly, the lightweight MobileNetV3 is introduced into CenterNet to extract multi-scale features of different layers. In addition, the lightweight receptive field enhancement module is proposed for the deep layer features to further enhance the characterization power of global features and generate more accurate heatmaps. Finally, the high-resolution feature fusion network with iterative aggregation is designed to reduce the loss of spatial semantic information in subsampling and further improve the accuracy of small and occlusion objects. Experiments are carried out on the TFITS and PASCAL VOC datasets. The results show that the size of the network is more than 60% lower than that of CenterNet. Compared with other detectors, our method achieves comparable accuracy with all accurate models at a much faster speed and meets the performance requirements of real-time detection.