Object

A Region Proposal Network, or RPN, is a fully convolutional network that simultaneously predicts object bounds and objectness scores at each position. The RPN is trained end-to-end to generate high-quality region proposals. RPN and algorithms like Fast R-CNN can be merged into a single network by sharing their convolutional features - using the recently popular terminology of neural networks with attention mechanisms, the RPN component tells the unified network where to look. RPNs are designed to efficiently predict region proposals with a wide range of scales and aspect ratios. RPNs use anchor boxes that serve as references at multiple scales and aspect ratios. The scheme can be thought of as a pyramid of regression references, which avoids enumerating images or filters of multiple scales or aspect ratios.

Region of Interest Align, or RoIAlign, is an operation for extracting a small feature map from each RoI in detection and segmentation based tasks. It removes the harsh quantization of RoI Pool, properly aligning the extracted features with the input. To avoid any quantization of the RoI boundaries or bins (using $x/16$ instead of $[x/16]$), RoIAlign uses bilinear interpolation to compute the exact values of the input features at four regularly sampled locations in each RoI bin, and the result is then aggregated (using max or average).

Faster R-CNN is an object detection model that improves on Fast R-CNN by utilising a region proposal network (RPN) with the CNN model. The RPN shares full-image convolutional features with the detection network, enabling nearly cost-free region proposals. It is a fully convolutional network that simultaneously predicts object bounds and objectness scores at each position. The RPN is trained end-to-end to generate high-quality region proposals, which are used by Fast R-CNN for detection. RPN and Fast R-CNN are merged into a single network by sharing their convolutional features: the RPN component tells the unified network where to look. As a whole, Faster R-CNN consists of two modules. The first module is a deep fully convolutional network that proposes regions, and the second module is the Fast R-CNN detector that uses the proposed regions.

A Focal Loss function addresses class imbalance during training in tasks like object detection. Focal loss applies a modulating term to the cross entropy loss in order to focus learning on hard misclassified examples. It is a dynamically scaled cross entropy loss, where the scaling factor decays to zero as confidence in the correct class increases. Intuitively, this scaling factor can automatically down-weight the contribution of easy examples during training and rapidly focus the model on hard examples. Formally, the Focal Loss adds a factor $(1 - p\_{t})^\gamma$ to the standard cross entropy criterion. Setting $\gamma>0$ reduces the relative loss for well-classified examples ($p\_{t}>.5$), putting more focus on hard, misclassified examples. Here there is tunable focusing parameter $\gamma \ge 0$. $$ {\text{FL}(p\_{t}) = - (1 - p\_{t})^\gamma \log\left(p\_{t}\right)} $$

Mask R-CNN extends Faster R-CNN to solve instance segmentation tasks. It achieves this by adding a branch for predicting an object mask in parallel with the existing branch for bounding box recognition. In principle, Mask R-CNN is an intuitive extension of Faster R-CNN, but constructing the mask branch properly is critical for good results. Most importantly, Faster R-CNN was not designed for pixel-to-pixel alignment between network inputs and outputs. This is evident in how RoIPool, the de facto core operation for attending to instances, performs coarse spatial quantization for feature extraction. To fix the misalignment, Mask R-CNN utilises a simple, quantization-free layer, called RoIAlign, that faithfully preserves exact spatial locations. Secondly, Mask R-CNN decouples mask and class prediction: it predicts a binary mask for each class independently, without competition among classes, and relies on the network's RoI classification branch to predict the category. In contrast, an FCN usually perform per-pixel multi-class categorization, which couples segmentation and classification.

SSD is a single-stage object detection method that 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. The fundamental improvement in speed comes from eliminating bounding box proposals and the subsequent pixel or feature resampling stage. Improvements over competing single-stage methods include using a small convolutional filter to predict object categories and offsets in bounding box locations, using separate predictors (filters) for different aspect ratio detections, and applying these filters to multiple feature maps from the later stages of a network in order to perform detection at multiple scales.

RetinaNet is a one-stage object detection model that utilizes a focal loss function to address class imbalance during training. Focal loss applies a modulating term to the cross entropy loss in order to focus learning on hard negative examples. RetinaNet is a single, unified network composed of a backbone network and two task-specific subnetworks. The backbone is responsible for computing a convolutional feature map over an entire input image and is an off-the-shelf convolutional network. The first subnet performs convolutional object classification on the backbone's output; the second subnet performs convolutional bounding box regression. The two subnetworks feature a simple design that the authors propose specifically for one-stage, dense detection. We can see the motivation for focal loss by comparing with two-stage object detectors. Here class imbalance is addressed by a two-stage cascade and sampling heuristics. The proposal stage (e.g., Selective Search, EdgeBoxes, DeepMask, RPN) rapidly narrows down the number of candidate object locations to a small number (e.g., 1-2k), filtering out most background samples. In the second classification stage, sampling heuristics, such as a fixed foreground-to-background ratio, or online hard example mining (OHEM), are performed to maintain a manageable balance between foreground and background. In contrast, a one-stage detector must process a much larger set of candidate object locations regularly sampled across an image. To tackle this, RetinaNet uses a focal loss function, a dynamically scaled cross entropy loss, where the scaling factor decays to zero as confidence in the correct class increases. Intuitively, this scaling factor can automatically down-weight the contribution of easy examples during training and rapidly focus the model on hard examples. Formally, the Focal Loss adds a factor $(1 - p\_{t})^\gamma$ to the standard cross entropy criterion. Setting $\gamma>0$ reduces the relative loss for well-classified examples ($p\_{t}>.5$), putting more focus on hard, misclassified examples. Here there is tunable focusing parameter $\gamma \ge 0$. $$ {\text{FL}(p\_{t}) = - (1 - p\_{t})^\gamma \log\left(p\_{t}\right)} $$

CSPDarknet53 is a convolutional neural network and backbone for object detection that uses DarkNet-53. It employs a CSPNet strategy to partition the feature map of the base layer into two parts and then merges them through a cross-stage hierarchy. The use of a split and merge strategy allows for more gradient flow through the network. This CNN is used as the backbone for YOLOv4.

Grid Sensitive is a trick for object detection introduced by YOLOv4. When we decode the coordinate of the bounding box center $x$ and $y$, in original YOLOv3, we can get them by $$ \begin{aligned} &x=s \cdot\left(g\_{x}+\sigma\left(p\_{x}\right)\right) \\ &y=s \cdot\left(g\_{y}+\sigma\left(p\_{y}\right)\right) \end{aligned} $$ where $\sigma$ is the sigmoid function, $g\_{x}$ and $g\_{y}$ are integers and $s$ is a scale factor. Obviously, $x$ and $y$ cannot be exactly equal to $s \cdot g\_{x}$ or $s \cdot\left(g\_{x}+1\right)$. This makes it difficult to predict the centres of bounding boxes that just located on the grid boundary. We can address this problem, by changing the equation to $$ \begin{aligned} &x=s \cdot\left(g\_{x}+\alpha \cdot \sigma\left(p\_{x}\right)-(\alpha-1) / 2\right) \\ &y=s \cdot\left(g\_{y}+\alpha \cdot \sigma\left(p\_{y}\right)-(\alpha-1) / 2\right) \end{aligned} $$ This makes it easier for the model to predict bounding box center exactly located on the grid boundary. The FLOPs added by Grid Sensitive are really small, and can be totally ignored.

YOLOv4 is a one-stage object detection model that improves on YOLOv3 with several bags of tricks and modules introduced in the literature. The components section below details the tricks and modules used.

FCOS is an anchor-box free, proposal free, single-stage object detection model. By eliminating the predefined set of anchor boxes, FCOS avoids computation related to anchor boxes such as calculating overlapping during training. It also avoids all hyper-parameters related to anchor boxes, which are often very sensitive to the final detection performance.

Group Normalization is a normalization layer that divides channels into groups and normalizes the features within each group. GN does not exploit the batch dimension, and its computation is independent of batch sizes. In the case where the group size is 1, it is equivalent to Instance Normalization. As motivation for the method, many classical features like SIFT and HOG had group-wise features and involved group-wise normalization. For example, a HOG vector is the outcome of several spatial cells where each cell is represented by a normalized orientation histogram. Formally, Group Normalization is defined as: $$ \mu\_{i} = \frac{1}{m}\sum\_{k\in\mathcal{S}\_{i}}x\_{k} $$ $$ \sigma^{2}\_{i} = \frac{1}{m}\sum\_{k\in\mathcal{S}\_{i}}\left(x\_{k}-\mu\_{i}\right)^{2} $$ $$ \hat{x}\_{i} = \frac{x\_{i} - \mu\_{i}}{\sqrt{\sigma^{2}\_{i}+\epsilon}} $$ Here $x$ is the feature computed by a layer, and $i$ is an index. Formally, a Group Norm layer computes $\mu$ and $\sigma$ in a set $\mathcal{S}\_{i}$ defined as: $\mathcal{S}\_{i} = ${$k \mid k\_{N} = i\_{N} ,\lfloor\frac{k\_{C}}{C/G}\rfloor = \lfloor\frac{I\_{C}}{C/G}\rfloor $}. Here $G$ is the number of groups, which is a pre-defined hyper-parameter ($G = 32$ by default). $C/G$ is the number of channels per group. $\lfloor$ is the floor operation, and the final term means that the indexes $i$ and $k$ are in the same group of channels, assuming each group of channels are stored in a sequential order along the $C$ axis.

YOLOv2, or YOLO9000, is a single-stage real-time object detection model. It improves upon YOLOv1 in several ways, including the use of Darknet-19 as a backbone, batch normalization, use of a high-resolution classifier, and the use of anchor boxes to predict bounding boxes, and more.

A BiFPN, or Weighted Bi-directional Feature Pyramid Network, is a type of feature pyramid network which allows easy and fast multi-scale feature fusion. It incorporates the multi-level feature fusion idea from FPN, PANet and NAS-FPN that enables information to flow in both the top-down and bottom-up directions, while using regular and efficient connections. It also utilizes a fast normalized fusion technique. Traditional approaches usually treat all features input to the FPN equally, even those with different resolutions. However, input features at different resolutions often have unequal contributions to the output features. Thus, the BiFPN adds an additional weight for each input feature allowing the network to learn the importance of each. All regular convolutions are also replaced with less expensive depthwise separable convolutions. Comparing with PANet, PANet added an extra bottom-up path for information flow at the expense of more computational cost. Whereas BiFPN optimizes these cross-scale connections by removing nodes with a single input edge, adding an extra edge from the original input to output node if they are on the same level, and treating each bidirectional path as one feature network layer (repeating it several times for more high-level future fusion).

CenterNet is a one-stage object detector that detects each object as a triplet, rather than a pair, of keypoints. It utilizes two customized modules named cascade corner pooling and center pooling, which play the roles of enriching information collected by both top-left and bottom-right corners and providing more recognizable information at the central regions, respectively. The intuition is that, if a predicted bounding box has a high IoU with the ground-truth box, then the probability that the center keypoint in its central region is predicted as the same class is high, and vice versa. Thus, during inference, after a proposal is generated as a pair of corner keypoints, we determine if the proposal is indeed an object by checking if there is a center keypoint of the same class falling within its central region.

Cascade Corner Pooling is a pooling layer for object detection that builds upon the corner pooling operation. Corners are often outside the objects, which lacks local appearance features. CornerNet uses corner pooling to address this issue, where we find the maximum values on the boundary directions so as to determine corners. However, it makes corners sensitive to the edges. To address this problem, we need to let corners see the visual patterns of objects. Cascade corner pooling first looks along a boundary to find a boundary maximum value, then looks inside along the location of the boundary maximum value to find an internal maximum value, and finally, add the two maximum values together. By doing this, the corners obtain both the the boundary information and the visual patterns of objects.

Center Pooling is a pooling technique for object detection that aims to capture richer and more recognizable visual patterns. The geometric centers of objects do not necessarily convey very recognizable visual patterns (e.g., the human head contains strong visual patterns, but the center keypoint is often in the middle of the human body). The detailed process of center pooling is as follows: the backbone outputs a feature map, and to determine if a pixel in the feature map is a center keypoint, we need to find the maximum value in its both horizontal and vertical directions and add them together. By doing this, center pooling helps the better detection of center keypoints.

EfficientDet is a type of object detection model, which utilizes several optimization and backbone tweaks, such as the use of a BiFPN, and a compound scaling method that uniformly scales the resolution,depth and width for all backbones, feature networks and box/class prediction networks at the same time.

Fast R-CNN is an object detection model that improves in its predecessor R-CNN in a number of ways. Instead of extracting CNN features independently for each region of interest, Fast R-CNN aggregates them into a single forward pass over the image; i.e. regions of interest from the same image share computation and memory in the forward and backward passes.

Cascade R-CNN is an object detection architecture that seeks to address problems with degrading performance with increased IoU thresholds (due to overfitting during training and inference-time mismatch between IoUs for which detector is optimal and the inputs). It is a multi-stage extension of the R-CNN, where detector stages deeper into the cascade are sequentially more selective against close false positives. The cascade of R-CNN stages are trained sequentially, using the output of one stage to train the next. This is motivated by the observation that the output IoU of a regressor is almost invariably better than the input IoU. Cascade R-CNN does not aim to mine hard negatives. Instead, by adjusting bounding boxes, each stage aims to find a good set of close false positives for training the next stage. When operating in this manner, a sequence of detectors adapted to increasingly higher IoUs can beat the overfitting problem, and thus be effectively trained. At inference, the same cascade procedure is applied. The progressively improved hypotheses are better matched to the increasing detector quality at each stage.

Region-based Fully Convolutional Networks, or R-FCNs, are a type of region-based object detector. In contrast to previous region-based object detectors such as Fast/Faster R-CNN that apply a costly per-region subnetwork hundreds of times, R-FCN is fully convolutional with almost all computation shared on the entire image. To achieve this, R-FCN utilises position-sensitive score maps to address a dilemma between translation-invariance in image classification and translation-variance in object detection.

SpatialDropout is a type of dropout for convolutional networks. For a given convolution feature tensor of size $n\_{\text{feats}}$×height×width, we perform only $n\_{\text{feats}}$ dropout trials and extend the dropout value across the entire feature map. Therefore, adjacent pixels in the dropped-out feature map are either all 0 (dropped-out) or all active as illustrated in the figure to the right.

Cascade Mask R-CNN extends Cascade R-CNN to instance segmentation, by adding a mask head to the cascade. In the Mask R-CNN, the segmentation branch is inserted in parallel to the detection branch. However, the Cascade R-CNN has multiple detection branches. This raises the questions of 1) where to add the segmentation branch and 2) how many segmentation branches to add. The authors consider three strategies for mask prediction in the Cascade R-CNN. The first two strategies address the first question, adding a single mask prediction head at either the first or last stage of the Cascade R-CNN. Since the instances used to train the segmentation branch are the positives of the detection branch, their number varies in these two strategies. Placing the segmentation head later on the cascade leads to more examples. However, because segmentation is a pixel-wise operation, a large number of highly overlapping instances is not necessarily as helpful as for object detection, which is a patch-based operation. The third strategy addresses the second question, adding a segmentation branch to each cascade stage. This maximizes the diversity of samples used to learn the mask prediction task. At inference time, all three strategies predict the segmentation masks on the patches produced by the final object detection stage, irrespective of the cascade stage on which the segmentation mask is implemented and how many segmentation branches there are.

Non-maximum suppression is an integral part of the object detection pipeline. First, it sorts all detection boxes on the basis of their scores. The detection box $M$ with the maximum score is selected and all other detection boxes with a significant overlap (using a pre-defined threshold) with $M$ are suppressed. This process is recursively applied on the remaining boxes. As per the design of the algorithm, if an object lies within the predefined overlap threshold, it leads to a miss. Soft-NMS solves this problem by decaying the detection scores of all other objects as a continuous function of their overlap with M. Hence, no object is eliminated in this process.

PrIme Sample Attention (PISA) directs the training of object detection frameworks towards prime samples. These are samples that play a key role in driving the detection performance. The authors define Hierarchical Local Rank (HLR) as a metric of importance. Specifically, they use IoU-HLR to rank positive samples and ScoreHLR to rank negative samples in each mini-batch. This ranking strategy places the positive samples with highest IoUs around each object and the negative samples with highest scores in each cluster to the top of the ranked list and directs the focus of the training process to them via a simple re-weighting scheme. The authors also devise a classification-aware regression loss to jointly optimize the classification and regression branches. Particularly, this loss would suppress those samples with large regression loss, thus reinforcing the attention to prime samples.

SNIP, or Scale Normalization for Image Pyramids, is a multi-scale training scheme that selectively back-propagates the gradients of object instances of different sizes as a function of the image scale. SNIP is a modified version of MST where only the object instances that have a resolution close to the pre-training dataset, which is typically 224x224, are used for training the detector. In multi-scale training (MST), each image is observed at different resolutions therefore, at a high resolution (like 1400x2000) large objects are hard to classify and at a low resolution (like 480x800) small objects are hard to classify. Fortunately, each object instance appears at several different scales and some of those appearances fall in the desired scale range. In order to eliminate extreme scale objects, either too large or too small, training is only performed on objects that fall in the desired scale range and the remainder are simply ignored during back-propagation. Effectively, SNIP uses all the object instances during training, which helps capture all the variations in appearance and pose, while reducing the domain-shift in the scale-space for the pre-trained network.

The Contour Proposal Network (CPN) detects possibly overlapping objects in an image while simultaneously fitting pixel-precise closed object contours. The CPN can incorporate state of the art object detection architectures as backbone networks into a fast single-stage instance segmentation model that can be trained end-to-end.

NAS-FPN is a Feature Pyramid Network that is discovered via Neural Architecture Search in a novel scalable search space covering all cross-scale connections. The discovered architecture consists of a combination of top-down and bottom-up connections to fuse features across scales

RepPoints is a representation for object detection that consists of a set of points which indicate the spatial extent of an object and semantically significant local areas. This representation is learned via weak localization supervision from rectangular ground-truth boxes and implicit recognition feedback. Based on the richer RepPoints representation, the authors develop an anchor-free object detector that yields improved performance compared to using bounding boxes.

Dense Contrastive Learning is a self-supervised learning method for dense prediction tasks. It implements self-supervised learning by optimizing a pairwise contrastive (dis)similarity loss at the pixel level between two views of input images. Contrasting with regular contrastive loss, the contrastive loss is computed between the single feature vectors outputted by the global projection head, at the level of global feature, while the dense contrastive loss is computed between the dense feature vectors outputted by the dense projection head, at the level of local feature.

Context Enhancement Module (CEM) is a feature extraction module used in object detection (specifically, ThunderNet) which aims to to enlarge the receptive field. The key idea of CEM is to aggregate multi-scale local context information and global context information to generate more discriminative features. In CEM, the feature maps from three scales are merged: $C\_{4}$, $C\_{5}$ and $C\_{glb}$. $C\_{glb}$ is the global context feature vector by applying a global average pooling on $C\_{5}$. We then apply a 1 × 1 convolution on each feature map to squeeze the number of channels to $\alpha \times p \times p = 245$. Afterwards, $C\_{5}$ is upsampled by 2× and $C\_{glb}$ is broadcast so that the spatial dimensions of the three feature maps are equal. At last, the three generated feature maps are aggregated. By leveraging both local and global context, CEM effectively enlarges the receptive field and refines the representation ability of the thin feature map. Compared with prior FPN structures, CEM involves only two 1×1 convolutions and a fc layer.

STAC is a semi-supervised framework for visual object detection along with a data augmentation strategy. STAC deploys highly confident pseudo labels of localized objects from an unlabeled image and updates the model by enforcing consistency via strong augmentations. We generate pseudo labels (i.e., bounding boxes and their class labels) for unlabeled data using test-time inference, including NMS , of the teacher model trained with labeled data. We then compute unsupervised loss with respect to pseudo labels whose confidence scores are above a threshold $\tau$ . The strong augmentations are applied for augmentation consistency during the model training. Target boxes are augmented when global geometric transformations are used.

VarifocalNet is a method aimed at accurately ranking a huge number of candidate detections in object detection. It consists of a new loss function, named Varifocal Loss, for training a dense object detector to predict the IACS, and a new efficient star-shaped bounding box feature representation for estimating the IACS and refining coarse bounding boxes. Combining these two new components and a bounding box refinement branch, results in a dense object detector on the FCOS architecture, what the authors call VarifocalNet or VFNet for short.

Varifocal Loss is a loss function for training a dense object detector to predict the IACS, inspired by focal loss. Unlike the focal loss that deals with positives and negatives equally, Varifocal Loss treats them asymmetrically. $$ VFL\left(p, q\right) = −q\left(q\log\left(p\right) + \left(1 − q\right)\log\left(1 − p\right)\right) \text{ if } q > 0 $$ $$ VFL\left(p, q\right) = −\alpha{p^{\gamma}}\log\left(1-p\right) $$ where $p$ is the predicted IACS and $q$ is the target IoU score. For a positive training example, $q$ is set as the IoU between the generated bounding box and the ground-truth one (gt IoU), whereas for a negative training example, the training target $q$ for all classes is $0$.