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.
There are two established classes of methods for object detection in images, one based on sliding windows and the other based on region proposal classification. Before the advent of convolutional neural networks, the state of the art for those two approaches -- Deformable Part Model (DPM) @cite_14 and Selective Search @cite_12 -- had comparable performance. However, after the dramatic improvement brought on by R-CNN @cite_18 , which combines selective search region proposals and convolutional network based post-classification, region proposal object detection methods became prevalent.
@cite_18 @cite_14 @cite_12
2102605133 2120419212 2088049833
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 present experiments that provide insight into what the network learns, revealing a rich hierarchy of image features. Source code for the complete system is available at http: www.cs.berkeley.edu rbg rcnn. This paper describes a discriminatively trained, multiscale, deformable part model for object detection. Our system achieves a two-fold improvement in average precision over the best performance in the 2006 PASCAL person detection challenge. It also outperforms the best results in the 2007 challenge in ten out of twenty categories. The system relies heavily on deformable parts. While deformable part models have become quite popular, their value had not been demonstrated on difficult benchmarks such as the PASCAL challenge. Our system also relies heavily on new methods for discriminative training. We combine a margin-sensitive approach for data mining hard negative examples with a formalism we call latent SVM. A latent SVM, like a hidden CRF, leads to a non-convex training problem. However, a latent SVM is semi-convex and the training problem becomes convex once latent information is specified for the positive examples. We believe that our training methods will eventually make possible the effective use of more latent information such as hierarchical (grammar) models and models involving latent three dimensional pose. This paper addresses the problem of generating possible object locations for use in object recognition. We introduce selective search which combines the strength of both an exhaustive search and segmentation. Like segmentation, we use the image structure to guide our sampling process. Like exhaustive search, we aim to capture all possible object locations. Instead of a single technique to generate possible object locations, we diversify our search and use a variety of complementary image partitionings to deal with as many image conditions as possible. Our selective search results in a small set of data-driven, class-independent, high quality locations, yielding 99 recall and a Mean Average Best Overlap of 0.879 at 10,097 locations. The reduced number of locations compared to an exhaustive search enables the use of stronger machine learning techniques and stronger appearance models for object recognition. In this paper we show that our selective search enables the use of the powerful Bag-of-Words model for recognition. The selective search software is made publicly available (Software: http: disi.unitn.it uijlings SelectiveSearch.html ).