Many state-of-the-art general object detection methods make use of shared full-image convolutional features (as in Faster R-CNN). This achieves a reasonable test-phase computation time while enjoys the discriminative power provided by large Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models. Such designs excel on benchmarks which contain natural images but which have very unnatural distributions, i.e. they have an unnaturally high-frequency of the target classes and a bias towards a "friendly" or "dominant" object scale. In this paper we present further study of the use and adaptation of the Faster R-CNN object detection method for datasets presenting natural scale distribution and unbiased real-world object frequency. In particular, we show that better alignment of the detector scale sensitivity to the extant distribution improves vehicle detection performance. We do this by modifying both the selection of Region Proposals, and through using more scale-appropriate full-image convolution features within the CNN model. By selecting better scales in the region proposal input and by combining feature maps through careful design of the convolutional neural network, we improve performance on smaller objects. We significantly increase detection AP for the KITTI dataset car class from 76.3 on our baseline Faster R-CNN detector to 83.6 in our improved detector.
The issue of image scale has long been important in object detection. An early and obvious approach is the use of a scale-space pyramid and windowing @cite_10 to allow a detector to only consider the problem at a single window scale. This can be particularly, effective when the detector is an attentional cascade @cite_15 or a relatively fast support vector machine approach with suitably fast features @cite_22 . However, such an approach can be challenging to integrate with today's powerful neural network models which do not yield such computationally minimalistic features. For this reason, some systems have chosen to use modern neural network designs only in the tail-end' of their detection cascades where the average per-image computation burden is low @cite_24 @cite_3
@cite_22 @cite_3 @cite_24 @cite_15 @cite_10
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We study the question of feature sets for robust visual object recognition; adopting linear SVM based human detection as a test case. After reviewing existing edge and gradient based descriptors, we show experimentally that grids of histograms of oriented gradient (HOG) descriptors significantly outperform existing feature sets for human detection. We study the influence of each stage of the computation on performance, concluding that fine-scale gradients, fine orientation binning, relatively coarse spatial binning, and high-quality local contrast normalization in overlapping descriptor blocks are all important for good results. The new approach gives near-perfect separation on the original MIT pedestrian database, so we introduce a more challenging dataset containing over 1800 annotated human images with a large range of pose variations and backgrounds. In real-world face detection, large visual variations, such as those due to pose, expression, and lighting, demand an advanced discriminative model to accurately differentiate faces from the backgrounds. Consequently, effective models for the problem tend to be computationally prohibitive. To address these two conflicting challenges, we propose a cascade architecture built on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with very powerful discriminative capability, while maintaining high performance. The proposed CNN cascade operates at multiple resolutions, quickly rejects the background regions in the fast low resolution stages, and carefully evaluates a small number of challenging candidates in the last high resolution stage. To improve localization effectiveness, and reduce the number of candidates at later stages, we introduce a CNN-based calibration stage after each of the detection stages in the cascade. The output of each calibration stage is used to adjust the detection window position for input to the subsequent stage. The proposed method runs at 14 FPS on a single CPU core for VGA-resolution images and 100 FPS using a GPU, and achieves state-of-the-art detection performance on two public face detection benchmarks. This paper describes a machine learning approach for visual object detection which is capable of processing images extremely rapidly and achieving high detection rates. This work is distinguished by three key contributions. The first is the introduction of a new image representation called the "integral image" which allows the features used by our detector to be computed very quickly. The second is a learning algorithm, based on AdaBoost, which selects a small number of critical visual features from a larger set and yields extremely efficient classifiers. The third contribution is a method for combining increasingly more complex classifiers in a "cascade" which allows background regions of the image to be quickly discarded while spending more computation on promising object-like regions. The cascade can be viewed as an object specific focus-of-attention mechanism which unlike previous approaches provides statistical guarantees that discarded regions are unlikely to contain the object of interest. In the domain of face detection the system yields detection rates comparable to the best previous systems. Used in real-time applications, the detector runs at 15 frames per second without resorting to image differencing or skin color detection. Humans perceive the three-dimensional structure of the world with apparent ease. However, despite all of the recent advances in computer vision research, the dream of having a computer interpret an image at the same level as a two-year old remains elusive. Why is computer vision such a challenging problem and what is the current state of the art? Computer Vision: Algorithms and Applications explores the variety of techniques commonly used to analyze and interpret images. It also describes challenging real-world applications where vision is being successfully used, both for specialized applications such as medical imaging, and for fun, consumer-level tasks such as image editing and stitching, which students can apply to their own personal photos and videos. More than just a source of recipes, this exceptionally authoritative and comprehensive textbook reference also takes a scientific approach to basic vision problems, formulating physical models of the imaging process before inverting them to produce descriptions of a scene. These problems are also analyzed using statistical models and solved using rigorous engineering techniques Topics and features: structured to support active curricula and project-oriented courses, with tips in the Introduction for using the book in a variety of customized courses; presents exercises at the end of each chapter with a heavy emphasis on testing algorithms and containing numerous suggestions for small mid-term projects; provides additional material and more detailed mathematical topics in the Appendices, which cover linear algebra, numerical techniques, and Bayesian estimation theory; suggests additional reading at the end of each chapter, including the latest research in each sub-field, in addition to a full Bibliography at the end of the book; supplies supplementary course material for students at the associated website, http: szeliski.org Book . Suitable for an upper-level undergraduate or graduate-level course in computer science or engineering, this textbook focuses on basic techniques that work under real-world conditions and encourages students to push their creative boundaries. Its design and exposition also make it eminently suitable as a unique reference to the fundamental techniques and current research literature in computer vision.