State-of-the-art object detection networks depend on region proposal algorithms to hypothesize object locations. Advances like SPPnet [1] and Fast R-CNN [2] have reduced the running time of these detection networks, exposing region proposal computation as a bottleneck. In this work, we introduce a Region Proposal Network (RPN) that shares full-image convolutional features with the detection network, thus enabling nearly cost-free region proposals. An 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, which are used by Fast R-CNN for detection. We further merge RPN and Fast R-CNN 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. For the very deep VGG-16 model [3] , our detection system has a frame rate of 5 fps (including all steps) on a GPU, while achieving state-of-the-art object detection accuracy on PASCAL VOC 2007, 2012, and MS COCO datasets with only 300 proposals per image. In ILSVRC and COCO 2015 competitions, Faster R-CNN and RPN are the foundations of the 1st-place winning entries in several tracks. Code has been made publicly available.

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.

Object detection performance, as measured on the canonical PASCAL VOC dataset, has plateaued in the last few years. The best-performing methods are complex ensemble systems that typically combine multiple low-level image features with high-level context. In this paper, we propose a simple and scalable detection algorithm that improves mean average precision (mAP) by more than 30% relative to the previous best result on VOC 2012-achieving a mAP of 53.3%. Our approach combines two key insights: (1) one can apply high-capacity convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to bottom-up region proposals in order to localize and segment objects and (2) when labeled training data is scarce, supervised pre-training for an auxiliary task, followed by domain-specific fine-tuning, yields a significant performance boost. Since we combine region proposals with CNNs, we call our method R-CNN: Regions with CNN features. We also compare R-CNN to OverFeat, a recently proposed sliding-window detector based on a similar CNN architecture. We find that R-CNN outperforms OverFeat by a large margin on the 200-class ILSVRC2013 detection dataset. Source code for the complete system is available at

0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 probability of ground truth class 0 1 2 3 4 5 loss = 0 = 0.5 = 1 = 2 = 5 well-classi ed examples well-classi ed examples CE(pt) = − log(pt) FL(pt) = −(1 − pt) γ log(pt) Figure 1. We propose a novel loss we term the Focal Loss that adds a factor (1 − pt) γ to the standard cross entropy criterion. Setting γ > 0 reduces the relative loss for well-classified examples (pt > .5), putting more focus on hard, misclassified examples. As our experiments will demonstrate, the proposed focal loss enables training highly accurate dense object detectors in the presence of vast numbers of easy background examples. AbstractThe highest accuracy object detectors to date are based on a two-stage approach popularized by R-CNN, where a classifier is applied to a sparse set of candidate object locations. In contrast, one-stage detectors that are applied over a regular, dense sampling of possible object locations have the potential to be faster and simpler, but have trailed the accuracy of two-stage detectors thus far. In this paper, we investigate why this is the case. We discover that the extreme foreground-background class imbalance encountered during training of dense detectors is the central cause. We propose to address this class imbalance by reshaping the standard cross entropy loss such that it down-weights the loss assigned to well-classified examples. Our novel Focal Loss focuses training on a sparse set of hard examples and prevents the vast number of easy negatives from overwhelming the detector during training. To evaluate the effectiveness of our loss, we design and train a simple dense detector we call RetinaNet. Our results show that when trained with the focal loss, RetinaNet is able to match the speed of previous one-stage detectors while surpassing the accuracy of all existing state-of-the-art two-stage detectors. Code is at: https://github.com/facebookresearch/Detectron. 50 100 150 200 250 inference time (ms) 28 30 32 34 36 38 COCO AP B C D E F G RetinaNet-50 RetinaNet-101 AP time [A] YOLOv2 † [27] 21.6 25 [B] SSD321 [22] 28.0 61 [C] DSSD321 [9] 28.0 85 [D] R-FCN ‡ [3] 29.9 85 [E] SSD513 [22] 31.2 125 [F] DSSD513 [9] 33.2 156 [G] FPN FRCN [20] 36.2 172 RetinaNet-50-500 32.5 73 RetinaNet-101-500 34.4 90 RetinaNet-101-800 37.8 198 † Not plotted ‡ Extrapolated time Figure 2. Speed (ms) versus accuracy (AP) on COCO test-dev. Enabled by the focal loss, our simple one-stage RetinaNet detector outperforms all previous one-stage and two-stage detectors, including the best reported Faster R-CNN [28] system from [20]. We show variants of RetinaNet with ResNet-50-FPN (blue circles) and ResNet-101-FPN (orange diamonds) at five scales (400-800 pixels). Ignoring the low-accuracy regime (AP<25), RetinaNet forms an upper envelope of all current detectors, and an improved variant (not shown) achieves 40.8 AP. Details are given in §5.

This paper proposes a Fast Region-based Convolutional Network method (Fast R-CNN) for object detection. Fast R-CNN builds on previous work to efficiently classify object proposals using deep convolutional networks. Compared to previous work, Fast R-CNN employs several innovations to improve training and testing speed while also increasing detection accuracy. Fast R-CNN trains the very deep VGG16 network 9× faster than R-CNN, is 213× faster at test-time, and achieves a higher mAP on PASCAL VOC 2012. Compared to SPPnet, Fast R-CNN trains VGG16 3× faster, tests 10× faster, and is more accurate. Fast R-CNN is implemented in Python and C++ (using Caffe) and is available under the open-source MIT License at https: //github.com/rbgirshick/fast-rcnn.

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.

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, \eg, 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 bells and whistles, 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 has been made available at: https://github.com/facebookresearch/Detectron.

No abstract