Recent researches attempt to improve the detection performance by adopting the idea of cascade for single-stage detectors. In this paper, we analyze and discover that inconsistency is the major factor limiting the performance. The refined anchors are associated with the feature extracted from the previous location and the classifier is confused by misaligned classification and localization. Further, we point out two main designing rules for the cascade manner: improving consistency between classification confidence and localization performance, and maintaining feature consistency between different stages. A multistage object detector named Cas-RetinaNet, is then proposed for reducing the misalignments. It consists of sequential stages trained with increasing IoU thresholds for improving the correlation, and a novel Feature Consistency Module for mitigating the feature inconsistency. Experiments show that our proposed Cas-RetinaNet achieves stable performance gains across different models and input scales. Specifically, our method improves RetinaNet from 39.1 AP to 41.1 AP on the challenging MS COCO dataset without any bells or whistles.
In advance of the wide development of deep convolutional networks, the sliding-window paradigm dominates the field of object detection for years. Most progress is related to handcrafted image descriptors such as HOG @cite_6 and SIFT @cite_13 . Based on these powerful features, DPMs @cite_3 help to extend dense detectors to more general object categories and achieves top results on PASCAL VOC @cite_29 .
@cite_29 @cite_3 @cite_13 @cite_6
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The Pascal Visual Object Classes (VOC) challenge is a benchmark in visual object category recognition and detection, providing the vision and machine learning communities with a standard dataset of images and annotation, and standard evaluation procedures. Organised annually from 2005 to present, the challenge and its associated dataset has become accepted as the benchmark for object detection. This paper describes the dataset and evaluation procedure. We review the state-of-the-art in evaluated methods for both classification and detection, analyse whether the methods are statistically different, what they are learning from the images (e.g. the object or its context), and what the methods find easy or confuse. The paper concludes with lessons learnt in the three year history of the challenge, and proposes directions for future improvement and extension. We describe an object detection system based on mixtures of multiscale deformable part models. Our system is able to represent highly variable object classes and achieves state-of-the-art results in the PASCAL object detection challenges. While deformable part models have become quite popular, their value had not been demonstrated on difficult benchmarks such as the PASCAL data sets. Our system relies on new methods for discriminative training with partially labeled data. We combine a margin-sensitive approach for data-mining hard negative examples with a formalism we call latent SVM. A latent SVM is a reformulation of MI--SVM in terms of latent variables. A latent SVM is semiconvex, and the training problem becomes convex once latent information is specified for the positive examples. This leads to an iterative training algorithm that alternates between fixing latent values for positive examples and optimizing the latent SVM objective function. An object recognition system has been developed that uses a new class of local image features. The features are invariant to image scaling, translation, and rotation, and partially invariant to illumination changes and affine or 3D projection. These features share similar properties with neurons in inferior temporal cortex that are used for object recognition in primate vision. Features are efficiently detected through a staged filtering approach that identifies stable points in scale space. Image keys are created that allow for local geometric deformations by representing blurred image gradients in multiple orientation planes and at multiple scales. The keys are used as input to a nearest neighbor indexing method that identifies candidate object matches. Final verification of each match is achieved by finding a low residual least squares solution for the unknown model parameters. Experimental results show that robust object recognition can be achieved in cluttered partially occluded images with a computation time of under 2 seconds. 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.