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.
Object detection, as of one the most fundamental and challenging problems in computer vision, has received great attention in recent years. Its development in the past two decades can be regarded as an epitome of computer vision history. If we think of today's object detection as a technical aesthetics under the power of deep learning, then turning back the clock 20 years we would witness the wisdom of cold weapon era. This paper extensively reviews 400+ papers of object detection in the light of its technical evolution, spanning over a quarter-century's time (from the 1990s to 2019). A number of topics have been covered in this paper, including the milestone detectors in history, detection datasets, metrics, fundamental building blocks of the detection system, speed up techniques, and the recent state of the art detection methods. This paper also reviews some important detection applications, such as pedestrian detection, face detection, text detection, etc, and makes an in-deep analysis of their challenges as well as technical improvements in recent years.
It is a common paradigm in object detection frameworks to treat all samples equally and target at maximizing the performance on average. In this work, we revisit this paradigm through a careful study on how different samples contribute to the overall performance measured in terms of mAP. Our study suggests that the samples in each mini-batch are neither independent nor equally important, and therefore a better classifier on average does not necessarily mean higher mAP. Motivated by this study, we propose the notion of Prime Samples, those that play a key role in driving the detection performance. We further develop a simple yet effective sampling and learning strategy called PrIme Sample Attention (PISA) that directs the focus of the training process towards such samples. Our experiments demonstrate that it is often more effective to focus on prime samples than hard samples when training a detector. Particularly, On the MSCOCO dataset, PISA outperforms the random sampling baseline and hard mining schemes, e.g. OHEM and Focal Loss, consistently by more than 1% on both single-stage and two-stage detectors, with a strong backbone ResNeXt-101.
Compared with object detection in static images, object detection in videos is more challenging due to degraded image qualities. An effective way to address this problem is to exploit temporal contexts by linking the same object across video to form tubelets and aggregating classification scores in the tubelets. In this paper, we focus on obtaining high quality object linking results for better classification. Unlike previous methods that link objects by checking boxes between neighboring frames, we propose to link in the same frame. To achieve this goal, we extend prior methods in following aspects: (1) a cuboid proposal network that extracts spatio-temporal candidate cuboids which bound the movement of objects; (2) a short tubelet detection network that detects short tubelets in short video segments; (3) a short tubelet linking algorithm that links temporally-overlapping short tubelets to form long tubelets. Experiments on the ImageNet VID dataset show that our method outperforms both the static image detector and the previous state of the art. In particular, our method improves results by 8.8% over the static image detector for fast moving objects.
Intersection over Union (IoU) is the most popular evaluation metric used in the object detection benchmarks. However, there is a gap between optimizing the commonly used distance losses for regressing the parameters of a bounding box and maximizing this metric value. The optimal objective for a metric is the metric itself. In the case of axis-aligned 2D bounding boxes, it can be shown that $IoU$ can be directly used as a regression loss. However, $IoU$ has a plateau making it infeasible to optimize in the case of non-overlapping bounding boxes. In this paper, we address the weaknesses of $IoU$ by introducing a generalized version as both a new loss and a new metric. By incorporating this generalized $IoU$ ($GIoU$) as a loss into the state-of-the art object detection frameworks, we show a consistent improvement on their performance using both the standard, $IoU$ based, and new, $GIoU$ based, performance measures on popular object detection benchmarks such as PASCAL VOC and MS COCO.
In this paper, we propose a simple and general framework for training very tiny CNNs for object detection. Due to limited representation ability, it is challenging to train very tiny networks for complicated tasks like detection. To the best of our knowledge, our method, called Quantization Mimic, is the first one focusing on very tiny networks. We utilize two types of acceleration methods: mimic and quantization. Mimic improves the performance of a student network by transfering knowledge from a teacher network. Quantization converts a full-precision network to a quantized one without large degradation of performance. If the teacher network is quantized, the search scope of the student network will be smaller. Using this feature of the quantization, we propose Quantization Mimic. It first quantizes the large network, then mimic a quantized small network. The quantization operation can help student network to better match the feature maps from teacher network. To evaluate our approach, we carry out experiments on various popular CNNs including VGG and Resnet, as well as different detection frameworks including Faster R-CNN and R-FCN. Experiments on Pascal VOC and WIDER FACE verify that our Quantization Mimic algorithm can be applied on various settings and outperforms state-of-the-art model acceleration methods given limited computing resouces.
Latest deep learning methods for object detection provide remarkable performance, but have limits when used in robotic applications. One of the most relevant issues is the long training time, which is due to the large size and imbalance of the associated training sets, characterized by few positive and a large number of negative examples (i.e. background). Proposed approaches are based on end-to-end learning by back-propagation [22] or kernel methods trained with Hard Negatives Mining on top of deep features [8]. These solutions are effective, but prohibitively slow for on-line applications. In this paper we propose a novel pipeline for object detection that overcomes this problem and provides comparable performance, with a 60x training speedup. Our pipeline combines (i) the Region Proposal Network and the deep feature extractor from [22] to efficiently select candidate RoIs and encode them into powerful representations, with (ii) the FALKON [23] algorithm, a novel kernel-based method that allows fast training on large scale problems (millions of points). We address the size and imbalance of training data by exploiting the stochastic subsampling intrinsic into the method and a novel, fast, bootstrapping approach. We assess the effectiveness of the approach on a standard Computer Vision dataset (PASCAL VOC 2007 [5]) and demonstrate its applicability to a real robotic scenario with the iCubWorld Transformations [18] dataset.
Modern CNN-based object detectors rely on bounding box regression and non-maximum suppression to localize objects. While the probabilities for class labels naturally reflect classification confidence, localization confidence is absent. This makes properly localized bounding boxes degenerate during iterative regression or even suppressed during NMS. In the paper we propose IoU-Net learning to predict the IoU between each detected bounding box and the matched ground-truth. The network acquires this confidence of localization, which improves the NMS procedure by preserving accurately localized bounding boxes. Furthermore, an optimization-based bounding box refinement method is proposed, where the predicted IoU is formulated as the objective. Extensive experiments on the MS-COCO dataset show the effectiveness of IoU-Net, as well as its compatibility with and adaptivity to several state-of-the-art object detectors.
We demonstrate that many detection methods are designed to identify only a sufficently accurate bounding box, rather than the best available one. To address this issue we propose a simple and fast modification to the existing methods called Fitness NMS. This method is tested with the DeNet model and obtains a significantly improved MAP at greater localization accuracies without a loss in evaluation rate, and can be used in conjunction with Soft NMS for additional improvements. Next we derive a novel bounding box regression loss based on a set of IoU upper bounds that better matches the goal of IoU maximization while still providing good convergence properties. Following these novelties we investigate RoI clustering schemes for improving evaluation rates for the DeNet wide model variants and provide an analysis of localization performance at various input image dimensions. We obtain a MAP of 33.6%@79Hz and 41.8%@5Hz for MSCOCO and a Titan X (Maxwell). Source code available from: //github.com/lachlants/denet
We introduce Spatial-Temporal Memory Networks (STMN) for video object detection. At its core, we propose a novel Spatial-Temporal Memory module (STMM) as the recurrent computation unit to model long-term temporal appearance and motion dynamics. The STMM's design enables the integration of ImageNet pre-trained backbone CNN weights for both the feature stack as well as the prediction head, which we find to be critical for accurate detection. Furthermore, in order to tackle object motion in videos, we propose a novel MatchTrans module to align the spatial-temporal memory from frame to frame. We compare our method to state-of-the-art detectors on ImageNet VID, and conduct ablative studies to dissect the contribution of our different design choices. We obtain state-of-the-art results with the VGG backbone, and competitive results with the ResNet backbone. To our knowledge, this is the first video object detector that is equipped with an explicit memory mechanism to model long-term temporal dynamics.
Scene text detection has been made great progress in recent years. The detection manners are evolving from axis-aligned rectangle to rotated rectangle and further to quadrangle. However, current datasets contain very little curve text, which can be widely observed in scene images such as signboard, product name and so on. To raise the concerns of reading curve text in the wild, in this paper, we construct a curve text dataset named CTW1500, which includes over 10k text annotations in 1,500 images (1000 for training and 500 for testing). Based on this dataset, we pioneering propose a polygon based curve text detector (CTD) which can directly detect curve text without empirical combination. Moreover, by seamlessly integrating the recurrent transverse and longitudinal offset connection (TLOC), the proposed method can be end-to-end trainable to learn the inherent connection among the position offsets. This allows the CTD to explore context information instead of predicting points independently, resulting in more smooth and accurate detection. We also propose two simple but effective post-processing methods named non-polygon suppress (NPS) and polygonal non-maximum suppression (PNMS) to further improve the detection accuracy. Furthermore, the proposed approach in this paper is designed in an universal manner, which can also be trained with rectangular or quadrilateral bounding boxes without extra efforts. Experimental results on CTW-1500 demonstrate our method with only a light backbone can outperform state-of-the-art methods with a large margin. By evaluating only in the curve or non-curve subset, the CTD + TLOC can still achieve the best results. Code is available at //github.com/Yuliang-Liu/Curve-Text-Detector.