OD-GCN object detection by knowledge graph with GCN

Classical object detection frameworks lack of utilizing objects' surrounding information. In this article, we introduce the graph convolutional networks (GCN) into the object detection, 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. It is a flexible framework that any pre-trained object detection models can be used as the base model. In the experiments, we try several popular base detection models, OD-GCN always improve mAP by 1-5 pp in COCO dataset. In addition, visualized analysis reveals the benchmark improvement is quite logical in human's opinion.