To better detect pedestrians of various scales, deep multi-scale methods usually detect pedestrians of different scales by different in-network layers. However, the semantic levels of features from different layers are usually inconsistent. In this paper, we propose a multi-branch and high-level semantic network by gradually splitting a base network into multiple different branches. As a result, the different branches have the same depth and the output features of different branches have similarly high-level semantics. Due to the difference of receptive fields, the different branches are suitable to detect pedestrians of different scales. Meanwhile, the multi-branch network does not introduce additional parameters by sharing convolutional weights of different branches. To further improve detection performance, skip-layer connections among different branches are used to add context to the branch of relatively small receptive filed, and dilated convolution is incorporated into part branches to enlarge the resolutions of output feature maps. When they are embedded into Faster RCNN architecture, the weighted scores of proposal generation network and proposal classification network are further proposed. Experiments on KITTI dataset, Caltech pedestrian dataset, and Citypersons dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed method. On these pedestrian datasets, the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art detection performance. Moreover, experiments on COCO benchmark show the proposed method is also suitable for general object detection.
How to detect pedestrians of various scales is a challenging problem. At first, Faster RCNN @cite_26 does not achieve state-of-the-art performance on pedestrian detection. The main reason can be summarized as follows: (1) The spatial resolution of feature map from output layer is low. It results that spatial information of small-scale pedestrian is heavily lost. (2) Faster RCNN generates candidate proposals of different scales based on the same feature map from last convolutional layer. As a result, the receptive field of this map can not match pedestrians of all scales very well.
@cite_26
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State-of-the-art object detection networks depend on region proposal algorithms to hypothesize object locations. Advances like SPPnet [7] and Fast R-CNN [5] 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. RPNs are trained end-to-end to generate high-quality region proposals, which are used by Fast R-CNN for detection. With a simple alternating optimization, RPN and Fast R-CNN can be trained to share convolutional features. For the very deep VGG-16 model [19], our detection system has a frame rate of 5fps (including all steps) on a GPU, while achieving state-of-the-art object detection accuracy on PASCAL VOC 2007 (73.2 mAP) and 2012 (70.4 mAP) using 300 proposals per image. Code is available at https: github.com ShaoqingRen faster_rcnn.