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.

Recent one-stage object detectors follow a per-pixel prediction approach that predicts both the object category scores and boundary positions from every single grid location. However, the most suitable positions for inferring different targets, i.e., the object category and boundaries, are generally different. Predicting all these targets from the same grid location thus may lead to sub-optimal results. In this paper, we analyze the suitable inference positions for object category and boundaries, and propose a prediction-target-decoupled detector named PDNet to establish a more flexible detection paradigm. Our PDNet with the prediction decoupling mechanism encodes different targets separately in different locations. A learnable prediction collection module is devised with two sets of dynamic points, i.e., dynamic boundary points and semantic points, to collect and aggregate the predictions from the favorable regions for localization and classification. We adopt a two-step strategy to learn these dynamic point positions, where the prior positions are estimated for different targets first, and the network further predicts residual offsets to the positions with better perceptions of the object properties. Extensive experiments on the MS COCO benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our method. With a single ResNeXt-64x4d-101-DCN as the backbone, our detector achieves 50.1 AP with single-scale testing, which outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by an appreciable margin under the same experimental settings.Moreover, our detector is highly efficient as a one-stage framework. Our code is public at https://github.com/yangli18/PDNet.

我们提出对象盒，这是一种新颖的单阶段锚定且高度可推广的对象检测方法。与现有的基于锚固的探测器和无锚的探测器相反，它们更偏向于其标签分配中的特定对象量表，我们仅将对象中心位置用作正样本，并在不同的特征级别中平均处理所有对象，而不论对象'尺寸或形状。具体而言，我们的标签分配策略将对象中心位置视为形状和尺寸不足的锚定，并以无锚固的方式锚定，并允许学习每个对象的所有尺度。为了支持这一点，我们将新的回归目标定义为从中心单元位置的两个角到边界框的四个侧面的距离。此外，为了处理比例变化的对象，我们提出了一个量身定制的损失来处理不同尺寸的盒子。结果，我们提出的对象检测器不需要在数据集中调整任何依赖数据集的超参数。我们在MS-Coco 2017和Pascal VOC 2012数据集上评估了我们的方法，并将我们的结果与最先进的方法进行比较。我们观察到，与先前的作品相比，对象盒的性能优惠。此外，我们执行严格的消融实验来评估我们方法的不同组成部分。我们的代码可在以下网址提供：https：//github.com/mohsenzand/objectbox。

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.

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).

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.

Object detection has been dominated by anchor-based detectors for several years. Recently, anchor-free detectors have become popular due to the proposal of FPN and Focal Loss. In this paper, we first point out that the essential difference between anchor-based and anchor-free detection is actually how to define positive and negative training samples, which leads to the performance gap between them. If they adopt the same definition of positive and negative samples during training, there is no obvious difference in the final performance, no matter regressing from a box or a point. This shows that how to select positive and negative training samples is important for current object detectors. Then, we propose an Adaptive Training Sample Selection (ATSS) to automatically select positive and negative samples according to statistical characteristics of object. It significantly improves the performance of anchor-based and anchor-free detectors and bridges the gap between them. Finally, we discuss the necessity of tiling multiple anchors per location on the image to detect objects. Extensive experiments conducted on MS COCO support our aforementioned analysis and conclusions. With the newly introduced ATSS, we improve stateof-the-art detectors by a large margin to 50.7% AP without introducing any overhead. The code is available at https://github.com/sfzhang15/ATSS.

Single-frame InfraRed Small Target (SIRST) detection has been a challenging task due to a lack of inherent characteristics, imprecise bounding box regression, a scarcity of real-world datasets, and sensitive localization evaluation. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive solution to these challenges. First, we find that the existing anchor-free label assignment method is prone to mislabeling small targets as background, leading to their omission by detectors. To overcome this issue, we propose an all-scale pseudo-box-based label assignment scheme that relaxes the constraints on scale and decouples the spatial assignment from the size of the ground-truth target. Second, motivated by the structured prior of feature pyramids, we introduce the one-stage cascade refinement network (OSCAR), which uses the high-level head as soft proposals for the low-level refinement head. This allows OSCAR to process the same target in a cascade coarse-to-fine manner. Finally, we present a new research benchmark for infrared small target detection, consisting of the SIRST-V2 dataset of real-world, high-resolution single-frame targets, the normalized contrast evaluation metric, and the DeepInfrared toolkit for detection. We conduct extensive ablation studies to evaluate the components of OSCAR and compare its performance to state-of-the-art model-driven and data-driven methods on the SIRST-V2 benchmark. Our results demonstrate that a top-down cascade refinement framework can improve the accuracy of infrared small target detection without sacrificing efficiency. The DeepInfrared toolkit, dataset, and trained models are available at https://github.com/YimianDai/open-deepinfrared to advance further research in this field.

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

在主现代探测器中，对象本地化的任务由集中在边界框回归的框子网实现。框子网通常通过回归框中心位置和缩放因子来预定对象的位置。虽然经常采用这种方法，但我们观察到本地化的结果仍然有缺陷，这使得探测器不满意的性能。在本文中，我们通过理论分析和实验验证证明了先前方法中的缺陷，并提出了一种精确检测物体的新型解决方案。通过估计对象边界处的分布，我们的方法而不是明显地关注中心和尺寸，通过估计在对象边界处的分布来改进边界框的边缘。实验结果表明了我们所提出的方法的潜力和泛化。

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。

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.

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。

In this paper, we introduce an anchor-box free and single shot instance segmentation method, which is conceptually simple, fully convolutional and can be used by easily embedding it into most off-the-shelf detection methods. Our method, termed PolarMask, formulates the instance segmentation problem as predicting contour of instance through instance center classification and dense distance regression in a polar coordinate. Moreover, we propose two effective approaches to deal with sampling high-quality center examples and optimization for dense distance regression, respectively, which can significantly improve the performance and simplify the training process. Without any bells and whistles, PolarMask achieves 32.9% in mask mAP with single-model and single-scale training/testing on the challenging COCO dataset.For the first time, we show that the complexity of instance segmentation, in terms of both design and computation complexity, can be the same as bounding box object detection and this much simpler and flexible instance segmentation framework can achieve competitive accuracy. We hope that the proposed PolarMask framework can serve as a fundamental and strong baseline for single shot instance segmentation task. Code is available at: github.com/xieenze/PolarMask.

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.

无锚的检测器基本上将对象检测作为密集的分类和回归。对于流行的无锚检测器，通常是引入单个预测分支来估计本地化的质量。当我们深入研究分类和质量估计的实践时，会观察到以下不一致之处。首先，对于某些分配了完全不同标签的相邻样品，训练有素的模型将产生相似的分类分数。这违反了训练目标并导致绩效退化。其次，发现检测到具有较高信心的边界框与相应的地面真相具有较小的重叠。准确的局部边界框将被非最大抑制（NMS）过程中的精确量抑制。为了解决不一致问题，提出了动态平滑标签分配（DSLA）方法。基于最初在FCO中开发的中心概念，提出了平稳的分配策略。在[0，1]中将标签平滑至连续值，以在正样品和负样品之间稳定过渡。联合（IOU）在训练过程中会动态预测，并与平滑标签结合。分配动态平滑标签以监督分类分支。在这样的监督下，质量估计分支自然合并为分类分支，这简化了无锚探测器的体系结构。全面的实验是在MS Coco基准上进行的。已经证明，DSLA可以通过减轻上述无锚固探测器的不一致来显着提高检测准确性。我们的代码在https://github.com/yonghaohe/dsla上发布。

物体检测在计算机视觉中取得了巨大的进步。具有外观降级的小物体检测是一个突出的挑战，特别是对于鸟瞰观察。为了收集足够的阳性/阴性样本进行启发式训练，大多数物体探测器预设区域锚，以便将交叉联盟（iou）计算在地面判处符号数据上。在这种情况下，小物体经常被遗弃或误标定。在本文中，我们提出了一种有效的动态增强锚（DEA）网络，用于构建新颖的训练样本发生器。与其他最先进的技术不同，所提出的网络利用样品鉴别器来实现基于锚的单元和无锚单元之间的交互式样本筛选，以产生符合资格的样本。此外，通过基于保守的基于锚的推理方案的多任务联合训练增强了所提出的模型的性能，同时降低计算复杂性。所提出的方案支持定向和水平对象检测任务。对两个具有挑战性的空中基准（即，DotA和HRSC2016）的广泛实验表明，我们的方法以适度推理速度和用于训练的计算开销的准确性实现最先进的性能。在DotA上，我们的DEA-NET与ROI变压器的基线集成了0.40％平均平均精度（MAP）的先进方法，以便用较弱的骨干网（Resnet-101 VS Resnet-152）和3.08％平均 - 平均精度（MAP），具有相同骨干网的水平对象检测。此外，我们的DEA网与重新排列的基线一体化实现最先进的性能80.37％。在HRSC2016上，它仅使用3个水平锚点超过1.1％的最佳型号。

在本文中，我们提出了简单的关注机制，我们称之为箱子。它可以实现网格特征之间的空间交互，从感兴趣的框中采样，并提高变压器的学习能力，以获得几个视觉任务。具体而言，我们呈现拳击手，短暂的框变压器，通过从输入特征映射上的参考窗口预测其转换来参加一组框。通过考虑其网格结构，拳击手通过考虑其网格结构来计算这些框的注意力。值得注意的是，Boxer-2D自然有关于其注意模块内容信息的框信息的原因，使其适用于端到端实例检测和分段任务。通过在盒注意模块中旋转的旋转的不变性，Boxer-3D能够从用于3D端到端对象检测的鸟瞰图平面产生识别信息。我们的实验表明，拟议的拳击手-2D在Coco检测中实现了更好的结果，并且在Coco实例分割上具有良好的和高度优化的掩模R-CNN可比性。 Boxer-3D已经为Waymo开放的车辆类别提供了令人信服的性能，而无需任何特定的类优化。代码将被释放。

物体检测通常需要在现代深度学习方法中基于传统或锚盒的滑动窗口分类器。但是，这些方法中的任何一个都需要框中的繁琐配置。在本文中，我们提供了一种新的透视图，其中检测对象被激励为高电平语义特征检测任务。与边缘，角落，斑点和其他特征探测器一样，所提出的探测器扫描到全部图像的特征点，卷积自然适合该特征点。但是，与这些传统的低级功能不同，所提出的探测器用于更高级别的抽象，即我们正在寻找有物体的中心点，而现代深层模型已经能够具有如此高级别的语义抽象。除了Blob检测之外，我们还预测了中心点的尺度，这也是直接的卷积。因此，在本文中，通过卷积简化了行人和面部检测作为直接的中心和规模预测任务。这样，所提出的方法享有一个无盒设置。虽然结构简单，但它对几个具有挑战性的基准呈现竞争准确性，包括行人检测和面部检测。此外，执行交叉数据集评估，证明所提出的方法的卓越泛化能力。可以访问代码和模型（https://github.com/liuwei16/csp和https://github.com/hasanirtiza/pedestron）。