Recent years have witnessed many exciting achievements for object detection using deep learning techniques. Despite achieving significant progresses, most existing detectors are designed to detect objects with relatively low-quality prediction of locations, i.e., often trained with the threshold of Intersection over Union (IoU) set to 0.5 by default, which can yield low-quality or even noisy detections. It remains an open challenge for how to devise and train a high-quality detector that can achieve more precise localization (i.e., IoU @math 0.5) without sacrificing the detection performance. In this paper, we propose a novel single-shot detection framework of Bidirectional Pyramid Networks (BPN) towards high-quality object detection, which consists of two novel components: (i) a Bidirectional Feature Pyramid structure for more effective and robust feature representations; and (ii) a Cascade Anchor Refinement to gradually refine the quality of predesigned anchors for more effective training. Our experiments showed that the proposed BPN achieves the best performances among all the single-stage object detectors on both PASCAL VOC and MS COCO datasets, especially for high-quality detections.
In literature, most object detection studies were focused on the detection with relatively low localization quality, with a default IoU threshold of 0.5. There are only a few related studies for high-quality detection. LocNet @cite_1 learns a postprocessing network for location refinement, which however does not optimize the whole system end-to-end and is not designed for high-quality detection tasks. MultiPath Network @cite_4 proposed to learn multiple detection branches for different quality thresholds. However, it still suffers insufficient training samples and it is computationally slow due to the nature of two-stage detectors. Cascaded RCNN @cite_15 learns regressors in a cascaded way, which gradually increases qualified proposal numbers towards high-quality detection. However, it is still based on two-stage RCNN and its slow inference speed is a critical drawback, especially the feature re-extraction step is operated by time-consuming ROI Pooling or ROI Warping.
@cite_15 @cite_1 @cite_4
2772955562 2177544419 2339890635
In object detection, an intersection over union (IoU) threshold is required to define positives and negatives. An object detector, trained with low IoU threshold, e.g. 0.5, usually produces noisy detections. However, detection performance tends to degrade with increasing the IoU thresholds. Two main factors are responsible for this: 1) overfitting during training, due to exponentially vanishing positive samples, and 2) inference-time mismatch between the IoUs for which the detector is optimal and those of the input hypotheses. A multi-stage object detection architecture, the Cascade R-CNN, is proposed to address these problems. It consists of a sequence of detectors trained with increasing IoU thresholds, to be sequentially more selective against close false positives. The detectors are trained stage by stage, leveraging the observation that the output of a detector is a good distribution for training the next higher quality detector. The resampling of progressively improved hypotheses guarantees that all detectors have a positive set of examples of equivalent size, reducing the overfitting problem. The same cascade procedure is applied at inference, enabling a closer match between the hypotheses and the detector quality of each stage. A simple implementation of the Cascade R-CNN is shown to surpass all single-model object detectors on the challenging COCO dataset. Experiments also show that the Cascade R-CNN is widely applicable across detector architectures, achieving consistent gains independently of the baseline detector strength. The code is available at https: github.com zhaoweicai cascade-rcnn. In object detection, an intersection over union (IoU) threshold is required to define positives and negatives. An object detector, trained with low IoU threshold, e.g. 0.5, usually produces noisy detections. However, detection performance tends to degrade with increasing the IoU thresholds. Two main factors are responsible for this: 1) overfitting during training, due to exponentially vanishing positive samples, and 2) inference-time mismatch between the IoUs for which the detector is optimal and those of the input hypotheses. A multi-stage object detection architecture, the Cascade R-CNN, is proposed to address these problems. It consists of a sequence of detectors trained with increasing IoU thresholds, to be sequentially more selective against close false positives. The detectors are trained stage by stage, leveraging the observation that the output of a detector is a good distribution for training the next higher quality detector. The resampling of progressively improved hypotheses guarantees that all detectors have a positive set of examples of equivalent size, reducing the overfitting problem. The same cascade procedure is applied at inference, enabling a closer match between the hypotheses and the detector quality of each stage. A simple implementation of the Cascade R-CNN is shown to surpass all single-model object detectors on the challenging COCO dataset. Experiments also show that the Cascade R-CNN is widely applicable across detector architectures, achieving consistent gains independently of the baseline detector strength. The code will be made available at this https URL. Large pose variations remain to be a challenge that confronts real-word face detection. We propose a new cascaded Convolutional Neural Network, dubbed the name Supervised Transformer Network, to address this challenge. The first stage is a multi-task Region Proposal Network (RPN), which simultaneously predicts candidate face regions along with associated facial landmarks. The candidate regions are then warped by mapping the detected facial landmarks to their canonical positions to better normalize the face patterns. The second stage, which is a RCNN, then verifies if the warped candidate regions are valid faces or not. We conduct end-to-end learning of the cascaded network, including optimizing the canonical positions of the facial landmarks. This supervised learning of the transformations automatically selects the best scale to differentiate face non-face patterns. By combining feature maps from both stages of the network, we achieve state-of-the-art detection accuracies on several public benchmarks. For real-time performance, we run the cascaded network only on regions of interests produced from a boosting cascade face detector. Our detector runs at 30 FPS on a single CPU core for a VGA-resolution image. Most of the recent successful methods in accurate object detection and localization used some variants of R-CNN style two stage Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) where plausible regions were proposed in the first stage then followed by a second stage for decision refinement. Despite the simplicity of training and the efficiency in deployment, the single stage detection methods have not been as competitive when evaluated in benchmarks consider mAP for high IoU thresholds. In this paper, we proposed a novel single stage end-to-end trainable object detection network to overcome this limitation. We achieved this by introducing Recurrent Rolling Convolution (RRC) architecture over multi-scale feature maps to construct object classifiers and bounding box regressors which are "deep in context". We evaluated our method in the challenging KITTI dataset which measures methods under IoU threshold of 0.7. We showed that with RRC, a single reduced VGG-16 based model already significantly outperformed all the previously published results. At the time this paper was written our models ranked the first in KITTI car detection (the hard level), the first in cyclist detection and the second in pedestrian detection. These results were not reached by the previous single stage methods. The code is publicly available.