The recently introduced panoptic segmentation task has renewed our community's interest in unifying the tasks of instance segmentation (for thing classes) and semantic segmentation (for stuff classes). However, current state-of-the-art methods for this joint task use separate and dissimilar networks for instance and semantic segmentation, without performing any shared computation. In this work, we aim to unify these methods at the architectural level, designing a single network for both tasks. Our approach is to endow Mask R-CNN, a popular instance segmentation method, with a semantic segmentation branch using a shared Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) backbone. Surprisingly, this simple baseline not only remains effective for instance segmentation, but also yields a lightweight, top-performing method for semantic segmentation. In this work, we perform a detailed study of this minimally extended version of Mask R-CNN with FPN, which we refer to as Panoptic FPN, and show it is a robust and accurate baseline for both tasks. Given its effectiveness and conceptual simplicity, we hope our method can serve as a strong baseline and aid future research in panoptic segmentation.
Feature pyramids are a basic component in recognition systems for detecting objects at different scales. But pyramid representations have been avoided in recent object detectors that are based on deep convolutional networks, partially because they are slow to 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 top-down 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 a basic Faster R-CNN system, our method achieves state-of-the-art single-model 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 5 FPS on a GPU and thus is a practical and accurate solution to multi-scale object detection. Code will be made publicly available. The way that information propagates in neural networks is of great importance. In this paper, we propose Path Aggregation Network (PANet) aiming at boosting information flow in proposal-based instance segmentation framework. Specifically, we enhance the entire feature hierarchy with accurate localization signals in lower layers by bottom-up path augmentation, which shortens the information path between lower layers and topmost feature. We present adaptive feature pooling, which links feature grid and all feature levels to make useful information in each level propagate directly to following proposal subnetworks. A complementary branch capturing different views for each proposal is created to further improve mask prediction. These improvements are simple to implement, with subtle extra computational overhead. Yet they are useful and make our PANet reach the 1st place in the COCO 2017 Challenge Instance Segmentation task and the 2nd place in Object Detection task without large-batch training. PANet is also state-of-the-art on MVD and Cityscapes.    Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are inherently limited to model geometric transformations due to the fixed geometric structures in their building modules. In this work, we introduce two new modules to enhance the transformation modeling capability of CNNs, namely, deformable convolution and deformable RoI pooling. Both are based on the idea of augmenting the spatial sampling locations in the modules with additional offsets and learning the offsets from the target tasks, without additional supervision. The new modules can readily replace their plain counterparts in existing CNNs and can be easily trained end-to-end by standard back-propagation, giving rise to deformable convolutional networks. Extensive experiments validate the performance of our approach. For the first time, we show that learning dense spatial transformation in deep CNNs is effective for sophisticated vision tasks such as object detection and semantic segmentation. The code is released at https: github.com msracver Deformable-ConvNets.   The development of object detection in the era of deep learning, from R-CNN [11], Fast Faster R-CNN [10, 31] to recent Mask R-CNN [14] and RetinaNet [24], mainly come from novel network, new framework, or loss design. However, mini-batch size, a key factor for the training of deep neural networks, has not been well studied for object detection. In this paper, we propose a Large Mini-Batch Object Detector (MegDet) to enable the training with a large minibatch size up to 256, so that we can effectively utilize at most 128 GPUs to significantly shorten the training time. Technically, we suggest a warmup learning rate policy and Cross-GPU Batch Normalization, which together allow us to successfully train a large mini-batch detector in much less time (e.g., from 33 hours to 4 hours), and achieve even better accuracy. The MegDet is the backbone of our submission (mmAP 52.5 ) to COCO 2017 Challenge, where we won the 1st place of Detection task. 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. In object detection, an intersection over union (IoU) threshold is required to define positives and negatives. An object detector, trained with low IoU threshold, e.g. 0.5, usually produces noisy detections. However, detection performance tends to degrade with increasing the IoU thresholds. Two main factors are responsible for this: 1) overfitting during training, due to exponentially vanishing positive samples, and 2) inference-time mismatch between the IoUs for which the detector is optimal and those of the input hypotheses. A multi-stage object detection architecture, the Cascade R-CNN, is proposed to address these problems. It consists of a sequence of detectors trained with increasing IoU thresholds, to be sequentially more selective against close false positives. The detectors are trained stage by stage, leveraging the observation that the output of a detector is a good distribution for training the next higher quality detector. The resampling of progressively improved hypotheses guarantees that all detectors have a positive set of examples of equivalent size, reducing the overfitting problem. The same cascade procedure is applied at inference, enabling a closer match between the hypotheses and the detector quality of each stage. A simple implementation of the Cascade R-CNN is shown to surpass all single-model object detectors on the challenging COCO dataset. Experiments also show that the Cascade R-CNN is widely applicable across detector architectures, achieving consistent gains independently of the baseline detector strength. The code is available at https: github.com zhaoweicai cascade-rcnn.