Experiment on Intermediate Feature Coding for Object Detection and Segmentation

With the recent development of deep learning, most computer vision-related tasks are being solved with deep learning-based network technologies such as CNN and RNN. Computer vision tasks such as object detection or object segmentation use intermediate features extracted from the same backbone such as Resnet or FPN for training and inference for object detection and segmentation. In this paper, an experiment was conducted to find out the compression efficiency and the effect of encoding on task inference performance when the features extracted in the intermediate stage of CNN are encoded. The feature map that combines the features of 256 channels into one image and the original image were encoded in HEVC to compare and analyze the inference performance for object detection and segmentation. Since the intermediate feature map encodes the five levels of feature maps (P2 to P6), the image size and resolution are increased compared to the original image. However, when the degree of compression is weakened, the use of feature maps yields similar or better inference results to the inference performance of the original image.