Although Faster R-CNN and its variants have shown promising performance in object detection, they only exploit simple first-order representation of object proposals for final classification and regression. Recent classification methods demonstrate that the integration of high-order statistics into deep convolutional neural networks can achieve impressive improvement, but their goal is to model whole images by discarding location information so that they cannot be directly adopted to object detection. In this paper, we make an attempt to exploit high-order statistics in object detection, aiming at generating more discriminative representations for proposals to enhance the performance of detectors. To this end, we propose a novel Multi-scale Location-aware Kernel Representation (MLKP) to capture high-order statistics of deep features in proposals. Our MLKP can be efficiently computed on a modified multi-scale feature map using a low-dimensional polynomial kernel approximation. Moreover, different from existing orderless global representations based on high-order statistics, our proposed MLKP is location retentive and sensitive so that it can be flexibly adopted to object detection. Through integrating into Faster R-CNN schema, the proposed MLKP achieves very competitive performance with state-of-the-art methods, and improves Faster R-CNN by 4.9 (mAP), 4.7 (mAP) and 5.0 (AP at IOU=[0.5:0.05:0.95]) on PASCAL VOC 2007, VOC 2012 and MS COCO benchmarks, respectively. Code is available at: https: github.com Hwang64 MLKP.
@cite_19: 
@cite_27: 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. SSD is simple relative to methods that require object proposals because it completely eliminates proposal generation and subsequent pixel or feature resampling stages 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, COCO, and ILSVRC datasets confirm that SSD has competitive accuracy to methods that utilize an additional object proposal step and is much faster, while providing a unified framework for both training and inference. For (300 300 ) input, SSD achieves 74.3 mAP on VOC2007 test at 59 FPS on a Nvidia Titan X and for (512 512 ) input, SSD achieves 76.9 mAP, outperforming a comparable state of the art Faster R-CNN model. Compared to other single stage methods, SSD has much better accuracy even with a smaller input image size. Code is available at https: github.com weiliu89 caffe tree ssd.
@cite_10: We introduce YOLO9000, a state-of-the-art, real-time object detection system that can detect over 9000 object categories. First we propose various improvements to the YOLO detection method, both novel and drawn from prior work. The improved model, YOLOv2, is state-of-the-art on standard detection tasks like PASCAL VOC and COCO. Using a novel, multi-scale training method the same YOLOv2 model can run at varying sizes, offering an easy tradeoff between speed and accuracy. At 67 FPS, YOLOv2 gets 76.8 mAP on VOC 2007. At 40 FPS, YOLOv2 gets 78.6 mAP, outperforming state-of-the-art methods like Faster RCNN with ResNet and SSD while still running significantly faster. Finally we propose a method to jointly train on object detection and classification. Using this method we train YOLO9000 simultaneously on the COCO detection dataset and the ImageNet classification dataset. Our joint training allows YOLO9000 to predict detections for object classes that dont have labelled detection data. We validate our approach on the ImageNet detection task. YOLO9000 gets 19.7 mAP on the ImageNet detection validation set despite only having detection data for 44 of the 200 classes. On the 156 classes not in COCO, YOLO9000 gets 16.0 mAP. YOLO9000 predicts detections for more than 9000 different object categories, all in real-time.
@cite_3: We present YOLO, a new approach to object detection. Prior work on object detection repurposes classifiers to perform detection. Instead, we frame object detection as a regression problem to spatially separated bounding boxes and associated class probabilities. A single neural network predicts bounding boxes and class probabilities directly from full images in one evaluation. Since the whole detection pipeline is a single network, it can be optimized end-to-end directly on detection performance. Our unified architecture is extremely fast. Our base YOLO model processes images in real-time at 45 frames per second. A smaller version of the network, Fast YOLO, processes an astounding 155 frames per second while still achieving double the mAP of other real-time detectors. Compared to state-of-the-art detection systems, YOLO makes more localization errors but is less likely to predict false positives on background. Finally, YOLO learns very general representations of objects. It outperforms other detection methods, including DPM and R-CNN, when generalizing from natural images to other domains like artwork.
In contrary to region-based detection methods ( , Faster R-CNN and its variants), alternative research pipeline is designing region-free detection methods. Among them, YOLO @cite_3 @cite_10 and SSD @cite_19 @cite_27 are two representative methods. YOLO @cite_3 utilizes one single neural network to predict bounding boxes and class probabilities from the full images directly, which trains the network with a loss function in term of detection performance. Different from YOLO, SSD @cite_27 discretizes the space of prediction of bounding boxes into a set of default boxes over several specific convolution layers. For inference, they compute the scores of each default box being to different object categories. Although region-free methods have faster training and inference speed than region-based ones, these methods discard generation of region proposals so that they often struggle with small objects and cannot filter out the negative samples belonging to the background. Furthermore, experimental results show our method can obtain higher accuracy than state-of-the-art region-free detection methods (See Sec. for more details). Note that it is indirect to incorporate our MLKP into region-free methods, where no object proposals can be represented by MLKP. This interesting problem is worth to be investigated in future.