DC-SPP-YOLO: Dense Connection and Spatial Pyramid Pooling Based YOLO for Object Detection

Although YOLOv2 approach is extremely fast on object detection; its backbone network has the low ability on feature extraction and fails to make full use of multi-scale local region features, which restricts the improvement of object detection accuracy. Therefore, this paper proposed a DC-SPP-YOLO (Dense Connection and Spatial Pyramid Pooling Based YOLO) approach for ameliorating the object detection accuracy of YOLOv2. Specifically, the dense connection of convolution layers is employed in the backbone network of YOLOv2 to strengthen the feature extraction and alleviate the vanishing-gradient problem. Moreover, an improved spatial pyramid pooling is introduced to pool and concatenate the multi-scale local region features, so that the network can learn the object features more comprehensively. The DC-SPP-YOLO model is established and trained based on a new loss function composed of mean square error and cross entropy, and the object detection is realized. Experiments demonstrate that the mAP (mean Average Precision) of DC-SPP-YOLO proposed on PASCAL VOC datasets and UA-DETRAC datasets is higher than that of YOLOv2; the object detection accuracy of DC-SPP-YOLO is superior to YOLOv2 by strengthening feature extraction and using the multi-scale local region features.Comment: 23 pages, 9 figures, 9 table

Feature-Fused SSD: Fast Detection for Small Objects

Small objects detection is a challenging task in computer vision due to its limited resolution and information. In order to solve this problem, the majority of existing methods sacrifice speed for improvement in accuracy. In this paper, we aim to detect small objects at a fast speed, using the best object detector Single Shot Multibox Detector (SSD) with respect to accuracy-vs-speed trade-off as base architecture. We propose a multi-level feature fusion method for introducing contextual information in SSD, in order to improve the accuracy for small objects. In detailed fusion operation, we design two feature fusion modules, concatenation module and element-sum module, different in the way of adding contextual information. Experimental results show that these two fusion modules obtain higher mAP on PASCALVOC2007 than baseline SSD by 1.6 and 1.7 points respectively, especially with 2-3 points improvement on some smallobjects categories. The testing speed of them is 43 and 40 FPS respectively, superior to the state of the art Deconvolutional single shot detector (DSSD) by 29.4 and 26.4 FPS. Code is available at https://github.com/wnzhyee/Feature-Fused-SSD. Keywords: small object detection, feature fusion, real-time, single shot multi-box detectorComment: Artificial Intelligence;8 pages,8 figure

Extend the shallow part of Single Shot MultiBox Detector via Convolutional Neural Network

Single Shot MultiBox Detector (SSD) is one of the fastest algorithms in the current object detection field, which uses fully convolutional neural network to detect all scaled objects in an image. Deconvolutional Single Shot Detector (DSSD) is an approach which introduces more context information by adding the deconvolution module to SSD. And the mean Average Precision (mAP) of DSSD on PASCAL VOC2007 is improved from SSD's 77.5% to 78.6%. Although DSSD obtains higher mAP than SSD by 1.1%, the frames per second (FPS) decreases from 46 to 11.8. In this paper, we propose a single stage end-to-end image detection model called ESSD to overcome this dilemma. Our solution to this problem is to cleverly extend better context information for the shallow layers of the best single stage (e.g. SSD) detectors. Experimental results show that our model can reach 79.4% mAP, which is higher than DSSD and SSD by 0.8 and 1.9 points respectively. Meanwhile, our testing speed is 25 FPS in Titan X GPU which is more than double the original DSSD.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, 3 table

StairNet: Top-Down Semantic Aggregation for Accurate One Shot Detection

One-stage object detectors such as SSD or YOLO already have shown promising accuracy with small memory footprint and fast speed. However, it is widely recognized that one-stage detectors have difficulty in detecting small objects while they are competitive with two-stage methods on large objects. In this paper, we investigate how to alleviate this problem starting from the SSD framework. Due to their pyramidal design, the lower layer that is responsible for small objects lacks strong semantics(e.g contextual information). We address this problem by introducing a feature combining module that spreads out the strong semantics in a top-down manner. Our final model StairNet detector unifies the multi-scale representations and semantic distribution effectively. Experiments on PASCAL VOC 2007 and PASCAL VOC 2012 datasets demonstrate that StairNet significantly improves the weakness of SSD and outperforms the other state-of-the-art one-stage detectors

Seeing Through Fog Without Seeing Fog: Deep Multimodal Sensor Fusion in Unseen Adverse Weather

The fusion of multimodal sensor streams, such as camera, lidar, and radar measurements, plays a critical role in object detection for autonomous vehicles, which base their decision making on these inputs. While existing methods exploit redundant information in good environmental conditions, they fail in adverse weather where the sensory streams can be asymmetrically distorted. These rare "edge-case" scenarios are not represented in available datasets, and existing fusion architectures are not designed to handle them. To address this challenge we present a novel multimodal dataset acquired in over 10,000km of driving in northern Europe. Although this dataset is the first large multimodal dataset in adverse weather, with 100k labels for lidar, camera, radar, and gated NIR sensors, it does not facilitate training as extreme weather is rare. To this end, we present a deep fusion network for robust fusion without a large corpus of labeled training data covering all asymmetric distortions. Departing from proposal-level fusion, we propose a single-shot model that adaptively fuses features, driven by measurement entropy. We validate the proposed method, trained on clean data, on our extensive validation dataset. Code and data are available here https://github.com/princeton-computational-imaging/SeeingThroughFog