It was one of first competitors of anchor-based single/two stage object detectors.
Understanding FCOS will help understanding other model inspired by FCOS.
Summary ...👇
📌 FCOS reformulates object detection in a per-pixel prediction fashion
📌 It uses multi-level prediction to improve the recall and resolve the ambiguity resulted from overlapped bounding boxes
📌 It proposes “center-ness” branch, which helps suppress the low-quality detected bounding boxes and improves the overall performance by a large margin
📌 It avoids complex computation such as the intersection-over-union (IoU)
📌 FCOS approach was also used in VFNet, YOLOX, and some other models