“…This method can output object bounding box directly from the network without additional post-processing (e.g., matching key points, non-maximum suppression). As frequently reported in previous studies [10,[26][27][28], the key point strategy in CenterNet is more reasonable and interpretable with better detection performance and faster computational speed on object detection tasks than other approaches such as CornerNet and ExtremeNet. Therefore, we only compared the results of our proposed method with the basic CenterNet and one of the most popular anchor-based methods (i.e., YOLOv3) to show the superiority of our proposed method in this study.…”