OD-GCN: Object Detection by Knowledge Graph with GCN

Classical object detection methods only extract the objects' image features via CNN, lack of utilizing the relationship among objects in the same image. In this article, we introduce the graph convolutional networks (GCN) into the object detection field and propose a new framework called OD-GCN (object detection with graph convolutional network). It utilizes the category relationship to improve the detection precision. We set up a knowledge graph to reflect the co-exist relationships among objects. GCN plays the role of post-processing to adjust the output of base object detection models, so it is a flexible framework that any pre-trained object detection models can be used as the base model. In experiments, we try several popular base detection models. OD-GCN always improve mAP by 1-5pp on COCO dataset. In addition, visualized analysis reveals the benchmark improvement is quite reasonable in human's opinion.