In this paper, we propose a novel query design for the transformer-based detectors. In previous transformer-based detectors, the object queries are a set of learned embeddings. However, each learned embedding does not have an explicit physical meaning and we can not explain where it will focus on. It is difficult to optimize as the prediction slot of each object query does not have a specific mode. In other words, each object query will not focus on a specific region. To solved these problems, in our query design, object queries are based on anchor points, which are widely used in CNN-based detectors. So each object query focus on the objects near the anchor point. Moreover, our query design can predict multiple objects at one position to solve the difficulty: "one region, multiple objects". In addition, we design an attention variant, which can reduce the memory cost while achieving similar or better performance than the standard attention in DETR. Thanks to the query design and the attention variant, the proposed detector that we called Anchor DETR, can achieve better performance and run faster than the DETR with 10$\times$ fewer training epochs. For example, it achieves 44.2 AP with 16 FPS on the MSCOCO dataset when using the ResNet50-DC5 feature for training 50 epochs. Extensive experiments on the MSCOCO benchmark prove the effectiveness of the proposed methods. Code is available at //github.com/megvii-model/AnchorDETR.
Object detection with transformers (DETR) reaches competitive performance with Faster R-CNN via a transformer encoder-decoder architecture. Inspired by the great success of pre-training transformers in natural language processing, we propose a pretext task named random query patch detection to unsupervisedly pre-train DETR (UP-DETR) for object detection. Specifically, we randomly crop patches from the given image and then feed them as queries to the decoder. The model is pre-trained to detect these query patches from the original image. During the pre-training, we address two critical issues: multi-task learning and multi-query localization. (1) To trade-off multi-task learning of classification and localization in the pretext task, we freeze the CNN backbone and propose a patch feature reconstruction branch which is jointly optimized with patch detection. (2) To perform multi-query localization, we introduce UP-DETR from single-query patch and extend it to multi-query patches with object query shuffle and attention mask. In our experiments, UP-DETR significantly boosts the performance of DETR with faster convergence and higher precision on PASCAL VOC and COCO datasets. The code will be available soon.
We present FoveaBox, an accurate, flexible and completely anchor-free framework for object detection. While almost all state-of-the-art object detectors utilize the predefined anchors to enumerate possible locations, scales and aspect ratios for the search of the objects, their performance and generalization ability are also limited to the design of anchors. Instead, FoveaBox directly learns the object existing possibility and the bounding box coordinates without anchor reference. This is achieved by: (a) predicting category-sensitive semantic maps for the object existing possibility, and (b) producing category-agnostic bounding box for each position that potentially contains an object. The scales of target boxes are naturally associated with feature pyramid representations for each input image. Without bells and whistles, FoveaBox achieves state-of-the-art single model performance of 42.1 AP on the standard COCO detection benchmark. Specially for the objects with arbitrary aspect ratios, FoveaBox brings in significant improvement compared to the anchor-based detectors. More surprisingly, when it is challenged by the stretched testing images, FoveaBox shows great robustness and generalization ability to the changed distribution of bounding box shapes. The code will be made publicly available.
In this paper, we propose PointRCNN for 3D object detection from raw point cloud. The whole framework is composed of two stages: stage-1 for the bottom-up 3D proposal generation and stage-2 for refining proposals in the canonical coordinates to obtain the final detection results. Instead of generating proposals from RGB image or projecting point cloud to bird's view or voxels as previous methods do, our stage-1 sub-network directly generates a small number of high-quality 3D proposals from point cloud in a bottom-up manner via segmenting the point cloud of whole scene into foreground points and background. The stage-2 sub-network transforms the pooled points of each proposal to canonical coordinates to learn better local spatial features, which is combined with global semantic features of each point learned in stage-1 for accurate box refinement and confidence prediction. Extensive experiments on the 3D detection benchmark of KITTI dataset show that our proposed architecture outperforms state-of-the-art methods with remarkable margins by using only point cloud as input.
Average precision (AP), the area under the recall-precision (RP) curve, is the standard performance measure for object detection. Despite its wide acceptance, it has a number of shortcomings, the most important of which are (i) the inability to distinguish very different RP curves, and (ii) the lack of directly measuring bounding box localization accuracy. In this paper, we propose 'Localization Recall Precision (LRP) Error', a new metric which we specifically designed for object detection. LRP Error is composed of three components related to localization, false negative (FN) rate and false positive (FP) rate. Based on LRP, we introduce the 'Optimal LRP', the minimum achievable LRP error representing the best achievable configuration of the detector in terms of recall-precision and the tightness of the boxes. In contrast to AP, which considers precisions over the entire recall domain, Optimal LRP determines the 'best' confidence score threshold for a class, which balances the trade-off between localization and recall-precision. In our experiments, we show that, for state-of-the-art object (SOTA) detectors, Optimal LRP provides richer and more discriminative information than AP. We also demonstrate that the best confidence score thresholds vary significantly among classes and detectors. Moreover, we present LRP results of a simple online video object detector which uses a SOTA still image object detector and show that the class-specific optimized thresholds increase the accuracy against the common approach of using a general threshold for all classes. We provide the source code that can compute LRP for the PASCAL VOC and MSCOCO datasets in //github.com/cancam/LRP. Our source code can easily be adapted to other datasets as well.
SSD (Single Shot Multibox Detector) is one of the best object detection algorithms with both high accuracy and fast speed. However, SSD's feature pyramid detection method makes it hard to fuse the features from different scales. In this paper, we proposed FSSD (Feature Fusion Single Shot Multibox Detector), an enhanced SSD with a novel and lightweight feature fusion module which can improve the performance significantly over SSD with just a little speed drop. In the feature fusion module, features from different layers with different scales are concatenated together, followed by some down-sampling blocks to generate new feature pyramid, which will be fed to multibox detectors to predict the final detection results. On the Pascal VOC 2007 test, our network can achieve 82.7 mAP (mean average precision) at the speed of 65.8 FPS (frame per second) with the input size 300$\times$300 using a single Nvidia 1080Ti GPU. In addition, our result on COCO is also better than the conventional SSD with a large margin. Our FSSD outperforms a lot of state-of-the-art object detection algorithms in both aspects of accuracy and speed. Code is available at //github.com/lzx1413/CAFFE_SSD/tree/fssd.
In this paper, we propose an efficient and fast object detector which can process hundreds of frames per second. To achieve this goal we investigate three main aspects of the object detection framework: network architecture, loss function and training data (labeled and unlabeled). In order to obtain compact network architecture, we introduce various improvements, based on recent work, to develop an architecture which is computationally light-weight and achieves a reasonable performance. To further improve the performance, while keeping the complexity same, we utilize distillation loss function. Using distillation loss we transfer the knowledge of a more accurate teacher network to proposed light-weight student network. We propose various innovations to make distillation efficient for the proposed one stage detector pipeline: objectness scaled distillation loss, feature map non-maximal suppression and a single unified distillation loss function for detection. Finally, building upon the distillation loss, we explore how much can we push the performance by utilizing the unlabeled data. We train our model with unlabeled data using the soft labels of the teacher network. Our final network consists of 10x fewer parameters than the VGG based object detection network and it achieves a speed of more than 200 FPS and proposed changes improve the detection accuracy by 14 mAP over the baseline on Pascal dataset.
Recent CNN based object detectors, no matter one-stage methods like YOLO, SSD, and RetinaNe or two-stage detectors like Faster R-CNN, R-FCN and FPN are usually trying to directly finetune from ImageNet pre-trained models designed for image classification. There has been little work discussing on the backbone feature extractor specifically designed for the object detection. More importantly, there are several differences between the tasks of image classification and object detection. 1. Recent object detectors like FPN and RetinaNet usually involve extra stages against the task of image classification to handle the objects with various scales. 2. Object detection not only needs to recognize the category of the object instances but also spatially locate the position. Large downsampling factor brings large valid receptive field, which is good for image classification but compromises the object location ability. Due to the gap between the image classification and object detection, we propose DetNet in this paper, which is a novel backbone network specifically designed for object detection. Moreover, DetNet includes the extra stages against traditional backbone network for image classification, while maintains high spatial resolution in deeper layers. Without any bells and whistles, state-of-the-art results have been obtained for both object detection and instance segmentation on the MSCOCO benchmark based on our DetNet~(4.8G FLOPs) backbone. The code will be released for the reproduction.
As we move towards large-scale object detection, it is unrealistic to expect annotated training data for all object classes at sufficient scale, and so methods capable of unseen object detection are required. We propose a novel zero-shot method based on training an end-to-end model that fuses semantic attribute prediction with visual features to propose object bounding boxes for seen and unseen classes. While we utilize semantic features during training, our method is agnostic to semantic information for unseen classes at test-time. Our method retains the efficiency and effectiveness of YOLO for objects seen during training, while improving its performance for novel and unseen objects. The ability of state-of-art detection methods to learn discriminative object features to reject background proposals also limits their performance for unseen objects. We posit that, to detect unseen objects, we must incorporate semantic information into the visual domain so that the learned visual features reflect this information and leads to improved recall rates for unseen objects. We test our method on PASCAL VOC and MS COCO dataset and observed significant improvements on the average precision of unseen classes.
Faster RCNN has achieved great success for generic object detection including PASCAL object detection and MS COCO object detection. In this report, we propose a detailed designed Faster RCNN method named FDNet1.0 for face detection. Several techniques were employed including multi-scale training, multi-scale testing, light-designed RCNN, some tricks for inference and a vote-based ensemble method. Our method achieves two 1th places and one 2nd place in three tasks over WIDER FACE validation dataset (easy set, medium set, hard set).
We present a method for detecting objects in images using a single deep neural network. Our approach, named SSD, discretizes the output space of bounding boxes into a set of default boxes over different aspect ratios and scales per feature map location. At prediction time, the network generates scores for the presence of each object category in each default box and produces adjustments to the box to better match the object shape. Additionally, the network combines predictions from multiple feature maps with different resolutions to naturally handle objects of various sizes. Our SSD model is simple relative to methods that require object proposals because it completely eliminates proposal generation and subsequent pixel or feature resampling stage and encapsulates all computation in a single network. This makes SSD easy to train and straightforward to integrate into systems that require a detection component. Experimental results on the PASCAL VOC, MS COCO, and ILSVRC datasets confirm that SSD has comparable accuracy to methods that utilize an additional object proposal step and is much faster, while providing a unified framework for both training and inference. Compared to other single stage methods, SSD has much better accuracy, even with a smaller input image size. For $300\times 300$ input, SSD achieves 72.1% mAP on VOC2007 test at 58 FPS on a Nvidia Titan X and for $500\times 500$ input, SSD achieves 75.1% mAP, outperforming a comparable state of the art Faster R-CNN model. Code is available at //github.com/weiliu89/caffe/tree/ssd .