In the paper "ForestNet: Classifying Drivers of Deforestation in Indonesia using Deep Learning on Satellite Imagery", the authors talk about using:

  1. Feature Pyramid Networks (as the architecture)
  2. EfficientNet-B2 (as the backbone)

Extract from Paper

What's the difference between architectures and backbones? I can't find much online. Specifically, what are their respective purposes? From a high-level perspective, what would integrating the two look like?


The vocabulary is definitely non-standard and a bit confusing, but Feature Pyramid Networks is used as a feature extractor, and its output is then fed into EfficientNet-B2 to be used to classify the image. One neural network model is concatenated at the end of the other.

So it seems like "architecture" is the front half of the neural network model which takes as input the satellite image and extracts image featuers, and then is directly connected to the back half of the model (hence "backbone"), which takes the features extracted from the "architecture" and makes a classification.

This terminology is definitely non-standard here, at least in the AI community, and if you ask anyone here I think it will be uncommon for them to naturally think about the words "architecture" vs "backbone" in this way unless they specialize in a similar field to the authors.

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    $\begingroup$ I don't know if it's standard or not, but I've seen the term "backbone" being used in several CV papers. For example, take a look at this famous paper (famous siamese networks) or this other one (mask R-CNN). I am pretty sure there are other examples, so I think that this terminology is not that uncommon, at least, in papers that introduce DL-based CV techniques. $\endgroup$ – nbro Dec 21 '20 at 0:08
  • $\begingroup$ There's also this SO question or this Stats question. In any case, I don't know if this terminology is being used consistently or not across all these papers. I am not familiar with the paper mentioned in this post (and I don't really have time to read it now), but I think that your interpretation of the terms is different than the usage of these terms in other contexts (such as mask R-CNN, although it's been a long time since I skimmed through that mask R-CNN papers). $\endgroup$ – nbro Dec 21 '20 at 0:11
  • $\begingroup$ So, if you have some time, I suggest that you go through these papers (and questions/posts) more carefully and try to understand what they really mean by that and if they are being used consistently across these papers. $\endgroup$ – nbro Dec 21 '20 at 0:17
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    $\begingroup$ Thanks! I'll give it a read when I get the chance $\endgroup$ – user3667125 Dec 21 '20 at 21:44

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