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 https://github.com/zhaoweicai/cascade-rcnn.

In object detection, the intersection over union (IoU) threshold is frequently used to define positives/negatives. The threshold used to train a detector defines its quality. While the commonly used threshold of 0.5 leads to noisy (low-quality) detections, detection performance frequently degrades for larger thresholds. This paradox of high-quality detection has two causes: 1) overfitting, due to vanishing positive samples for large thresholds, and 2) inference-time quality mismatch between detector and test hypotheses. A multi-stage object detection architecture, the Cascade R-CNN, composed of a sequence of detectors trained with increasing IoU thresholds, is proposed to address these problems. The detectors are trained sequentially, using the output of a detector as training set for the next. This resampling progressively improves hypotheses quality, guaranteeing a positive training set of equivalent size for all detectors and minimizing overfitting. The same cascade is applied at inference, to eliminate quality mismatches between hypotheses and detectors. An implementation of the Cascade R-CNN without bells or whistles achieves state-of-the-art performance on the COCO dataset, and significantly improves high-quality detection on generic and specific object detection datasets, including VOC, KITTI, CityPerson, and WiderFace. Finally, the Cascade R-CNN is generalized to instance segmentation, with nontrivial improvements over the Mask R-CNN. To facilitate future research, two implementations are made available at https://github.com/zhaoweicai/cascade-rcnn (Caffe) and https://github.com/zhaoweicai/Detectron-Cascade-RCNN (Detectron).

Compared with model architectures, the training process, which is also crucial to the success of detectors, has received relatively less attention in object detection. In this work, we carefully revisit the standard training practice of detectors, and find that the detection performance is often limited by the imbalance during the training process, which generally consists in three levels -sample level, feature level, and objective level. To mitigate the adverse effects caused thereby, we propose Libra R-CNN, a simple but effective framework towards balanced learning for object detection. It integrates three novel components: IoU-balanced sampling, balanced feature pyramid, and balanced L1 loss, respectively for reducing the imbalance at sample, feature, and objective level. Benefitted from the overall balanced design, Libra R-CNN significantly improves the detection performance. Without bells and whistles, it achieves 2.5 points and 2.0 points higher Average Precision (AP) than FPN Faster R-CNN and RetinaNet respectively on MSCOCO. 1

对象检测是计算机视野领域的一个非常重要的基本研究方向，以及计算机视野领域的其他高级任务的基本方法。它已广泛用于实际应用，如对象跟踪，视频行为识别和水下机器人愿景。Cascade-RCNN和可变形卷积网络都是经典和优异的对象检测算法。在本报告中，我们在带有不同的工程技巧和Augumentation的水下光学图像和声学图像数据集中评估基于Cascade-DCN的方法。

Cascade is a classic yet powerful architecture that has boosted performance on various tasks. However, how to introduce cascade to instance segmentation remains an open question. A simple combination of Cascade R-CNN and Mask R-CNN only brings limited gain. In exploring a more effective approach, we find that the key to a successful instance segmentation cascade is to fully leverage the reciprocal relationship between detection and segmentation. In this work, we propose a new framework, Hybrid Task Cascade (HTC), which differs in two important aspects: (1) instead of performing cascaded refinement on these two tasks separately, it interweaves them for a joint multi-stage processing; (2) it adopts a fully convolutional branch to provide spatial context, which can help distinguishing hard foreground from cluttered background. Overall, this framework can learn more discriminative features progressively while integrating complementary features together in each stage. Without bells and whistles, a single HTC obtains 38.4% and 1.5% improvement over a strong Cascade Mask R-CNN baseline on MSCOCO dataset. Moreover, our overall system achieves 48.6 mask AP on the test-challenge split, ranking 1st in the COCO 2018 Challenge Object Detection Task. Code is available at: https://github.com/ open-mmlab/mmdetection.

We propose a fully convolutional one-stage object detector (FCOS) to solve object detection in a per-pixel prediction fashion, analogue to semantic segmentation. Almost all state-of-the-art object detectors such as RetinaNet, SSD, YOLOv3, and Faster R-CNN rely on pre-defined anchor boxes. In contrast, our proposed detector FCOS is anchor box free, as well as proposal free. By eliminating the predefined set of anchor boxes, FCOS completely avoids the complicated computation related to anchor boxes such as calculating overlapping during training. More importantly, we also avoid all hyper-parameters related to anchor boxes, which are often very sensitive to the final detection performance. With the only post-processing non-maximum suppression (NMS), FCOS with ResNeXt-64x4d-101 achieves 44.7% in AP with single-model and single-scale testing, surpassing previous one-stage detectors with the advantage of being much simpler. For the first time, we demonstrate a much simpler and flexible detection framework achieving improved detection accuracy. We hope that the proposed FCOS framework can serve as a simple and strong alternative for many other instance-level tasks. Code is available at:tinyurl.com/FCOSv1

Letting a deep network be aware of the quality of its own predictions is an interesting yet important problem. In the task of instance segmentation, the confidence of instance classification is used as mask quality score in most instance segmentation frameworks. However, the mask quality, quantified as the IoU between the instance mask and its ground truth, is usually not well correlated with classification score. In this paper, we study this problem and propose Mask Scoring R-CNN which contains a network block to learn the quality of the predicted instance masks. The proposed network block takes the instance feature and the corresponding predicted mask together to regress the mask IoU. The mask scoring strategy calibrates the misalignment between mask quality and mask score, and improves instance segmentation performance by prioritizing more accurate mask predictions during COCO AP evaluation. By extensive evaluations on the COCO dataset, Mask Scoring R-CNN brings consistent and noticeable gain with different models, and outperforms the state-of-the-art Mask R-CNN. We hope our simple and effective approach will provide a new direction for improving instance segmentation. The source code of our method is available at https:// github.com/zjhuang22/maskscoring_rcnn. * The work was done when Zhaojin Huang was an intern in Horizon Robotics Inc.

We present a conceptually simple, flexible, and general framework for object instance segmentation. Our approach efficiently detects objects in an image while simultaneously generating a high-quality segmentation mask for each instance. The method, called Mask R-CNN, extends Faster R-CNN by adding a branch for predicting an object mask in parallel with the existing branch for bounding box recognition. Mask R-CNN is simple to train and adds only a small overhead to Faster R-CNN, running at 5 fps. Moreover, Mask R-CNN is easy to generalize to other tasks, e.g., allowing us to estimate human poses in the same framework. We show top results in all three tracks of the COCO suite of challenges, including instance segmentation, bounding-box object detection, and person keypoint detection. Without tricks, Mask R-CNN outperforms all existing, single-model entries on every task, including the COCO 2016 challenge winners. We hope our simple and effective approach will serve as a solid baseline and help ease future research in instance-level recognition. Code will be made available.

Modern object detectors rely heavily on rectangular bounding boxes, such as anchors, proposals and the final predictions, to represent objects at various recognition stages. The bounding box is convenient to use but provides only a coarse localization of objects and leads to a correspondingly coarse extraction of object features. In this paper, we present RepPoints (representative points), a new finer representation of objects as a set of sample points useful for both localization and recognition. Given ground truth localization and recognition targets for training, RepPoints learn to automatically arrange themselves in a manner that bounds the spatial extent of an object and indicates semantically significant local areas. They furthermore do not require the use of anchors to sample a space of bounding boxes. We show that an anchor-free object detector based on RepPoints can be as effective as the state-of-the-art anchor-based detection methods, with 46.5 AP and 67.4 AP 50 on the COCO test-dev detection benchmark, using ResNet-101 model. Code is available at https://github.com/microsoft/RepPoints.

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.

多年来，使用单点监督的对象检测受到了越来越多的关注。在本文中，我们将如此巨大的性能差距归因于产生高质量的提案袋的失败，这对于多个实例学习至关重要（MIL）。为了解决这个问题，我们引入了现成建议方法（OTSP）方法的轻量级替代方案，从而创建点对点网络（P2BNET），该网络可以通过在中生成建议袋来构建一个互平衡的提案袋一种锚点。通过充分研究准确的位置信息，P2BNET进一步构建了一个实例级袋，避免了多个物体的混合物。最后，以级联方式进行的粗到精细政策用于改善提案和地面真相（GT）之间的IOU。从这些策略中受益，P2BNET能够生产出高质量的实例级袋以进行对象检测。相对于MS可可数据集中的先前最佳PSOD方法，P2BNET将平均平均精度（AP）提高了50％以上。它还证明了弥合监督和边界盒监督检测器之间的性能差距的巨大潜力。该代码将在github.com/ucas-vg/p2bnet上发布。

Feature pyramids are a basic component in recognition systems for detecting objects at different scales. But recent deep learning object detectors have avoided pyramid representations, in part because they are compute and memory intensive. In this paper, we exploit the inherent multi-scale, pyramidal hierarchy of deep convolutional networks to construct feature pyramids with marginal extra cost. A topdown architecture with lateral connections is developed for building high-level semantic feature maps at all scales. This architecture, called a Feature Pyramid Network (FPN), shows significant improvement as a generic feature extractor in several applications. Using FPN in a basic Faster R-CNN system, our method achieves state-of-the-art singlemodel results on the COCO detection benchmark without bells and whistles, surpassing all existing single-model entries including those from the COCO 2016 challenge winners. In addition, our method can run at 6 FPS on a GPU and thus is a practical and accurate solution to multi-scale object detection. Code will be made publicly available.

DETR方法中引入的查询机制正在改变对象检测的范例，最近有许多基于查询的方法获得了强对象检测性能。但是，当前基于查询的检测管道遇到了以下两个问题。首先，需要多阶段解码器来优化随机初始化的对象查询，从而产生较大的计算负担。其次，训练后的查询是固定的，导致不满意的概括能力。为了纠正上述问题，我们在较快的R-CNN框架中提出了通过查询生成网络预测的特征对象查询，并开发了一个功能性的查询R-CNN。可可数据集的广泛实验表明，我们的特征查询R-CNN获得了所有R-CNN探测器的最佳速度准确性权衡，包括最近的最新稀疏R-CNN检测器。该代码可在\ url {https://github.com/hustvl/featurized-queryrcnn}中获得。

复杂的水下环境为物体检测带来了新的挑战，例如未平衡的光条件，低对比度，阻塞和水生生物的模仿。在这种情况下，水下相机捕获的物体将变得模糊，并且通用探测器通常会在这些模糊的物体上失败。这项工作旨在从两个角度解决问题：不确定性建模和艰难的例子采矿。我们提出了一个名为Boosting R-CNN的两阶段水下检测器，该检测器包括三个关键组件。首先，提出了一个名为RetinArpn的新区域建议网络，该网络提供了高质量的建议，并考虑了对象和IOU预测，以确定对象事先概率的不确定性。其次，引入了概率推理管道，以结合第一阶段的先验不确定性和第二阶段分类评分，以模拟最终检测分数。最后，我们提出了一种名为Boosting Reweighting的新的硬示例挖掘方法。具体而言，当区域提案网络误认为样品的对象的事先概率时，提高重新加权将在训练过程中增加R-CNN头部样品的分类损失，同时减少具有准确估计的先验的简易样品丢失。因此，可以在第二阶段获得强大的检测头。在推理阶段，R-CNN具有纠正第一阶段的误差以提高性能的能力。在两个水下数据集和两个通用对象检测数据集上进行的全面实验证明了我们方法的有效性和鲁棒性。

Due to object detection's close relationship with video analysis and image understanding, it has attracted much research attention in recent years. Traditional object detection methods are built on handcrafted features and shallow trainable architectures. Their performance easily stagnates by constructing complex ensembles which combine multiple low-level image features with high-level context from object detectors and scene classifiers. With the rapid development in deep learning, more powerful tools, which are able to learn semantic, high-level, deeper features, are introduced to address the problems existing in traditional architectures. These models behave differently in network architecture, training strategy and optimization function, etc. In this paper, we provide a review on deep learning based object detection frameworks. Our review begins with a brief introduction on the history of deep learning and its representative tool, namely Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Then we focus on typical generic object detection architectures along with some modifications and useful tricks to improve detection performance further. As distinct specific detection tasks exhibit different characteristics, we also briefly survey several specific tasks, including salient object detection, face detection and pedestrian detection. Experimental analyses are also provided to compare various methods and draw some meaningful conclusions. Finally, several promising directions and tasks are provided to serve as guidelines for future work in both object detection and relevant neural network based learning systems.

检测微小的物体是一个非常具有挑战性的问题，因为一个小物体只包含几个像素的大小。我们证明，由于缺乏外观信息，最新的检测器不会对微小物体产生令人满意的结果。我们的主要观察结果是，基于联合（IOU）的相交（例如IOU本身及其扩展）对微小物体的位置偏差非常敏感，并且在基于锚固的检测器中使用时会大大恶化检测性能。为了减轻这一点，我们提出了使用Wasserstein距离进行微小对象检测的新评估度量。具体而言，我们首先将边界框建模为2D高斯分布，然后提出一个新的公制称为标准化的瓦斯汀距离（NWD），以通过相应的高斯分布来计算它们之间的相似性。提出的NWD度量可以轻松地嵌入分配中，非最大抑制作用以及任何基于锚固的检测器的损耗函数，以替换常用的IOU度量。我们在新的数据集上评估了我们的度量，以用于微小对象检测（AI-TOD），其中平均对象大小比现有对象检测数据集小得多。广泛的实验表明，在配备NWD指标时，我们的方法的性能比标准的微调基线高6.7 AP点，并且比最先进的竞争对手高6.0 AP点。代码可在以下网址提供：https：//github.com/jwwangchn/nwd。

In object detection, keypoint-based approaches often suffer a large number of incorrect object bounding boxes, arguably due to the lack of an additional look into the cropped regions. This paper presents an efficient solution which explores the visual patterns within each cropped region with minimal costs. We build our framework upon a representative one-stage keypoint-based detector named Corner-Net. Our approach, named CenterNet, detects each object as a triplet, rather than a pair, of keypoints, which improves both precision and recall. Accordingly, we design 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. On the MS-COCO dataset, CenterNet achieves an AP of 47.0%, which outperforms all existing one-stage detectors by at least 4.9%. Meanwhile, with a faster inference speed, CenterNet demonstrates quite comparable performance to the top-ranked two-stage detectors. Code is available at https://github.com/ Duankaiwen/CenterNet.

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. To this end, we propose Soft-NMS, an algorithm which decays the detection scores of all other objects as a continuous function of their overlap with M. Hence, no object is eliminated in this process. Soft-NMS obtains consistent improvements for the coco-style mAP metric on standard datasets like PASCAL VOC 2007 (1.7% for both R-FCN and Faster-RCNN) and MS-COCO (1.3% for R-FCN and 1.1% for Faster-RCNN) by just changing the NMS algorithm without any additional hyper-parameters. UsingDeformable-RFCN, Soft-NMS improves state-of-the-art in object detection from 39.8% to 40.9% with a single model. Further, the computational complexity of Soft-NMS is the same as traditional NMS and hence it can be efficiently implemented. Since Soft-NMS does not require any extra training and is simple to implement, it can be easily integrated into any object detection pipeline. Code for Soft-NMS is publicly available on GitHub http://bit.ly/ 2nJLNMu.