1st Place Solution for ICDAR 2021 Competition on Mathematical Formula Detection

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In this technical report, we present our 1st place solution for the ICDAR 2021 competition on mathematical formula detection (MFD).

• The MFD task has three key challenges including a large scale span, large variation of the ratio between height and width, and rich character set and mathematical expressions.
• Considering these challenges, we used Generalized Focal Loss (GFL), an anchor-free method, instead of the anchor-based method, and prove the Adaptive Training Sampling Strategy (ATSS) and proper Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) can well solve the important issue of scale variation.
• Meanwhile, we also found some tricks, e.g., Deformable Convolution Network (DCN), SyncBN, and Weighted Box Fusion (WBF), were effective in MFD task.