Deep learning for small object detection

Small object detection has become increasingly relevant due to the fact that the performance of common object detectors falls significantly as objects become smaller. Many computer vision applications require the analysis of the entire set of objects in the image, including extremely small objects. Moreover, the detection of small objects allows to perceive objects at a greater distance, thus giving more time to adapt to any situation or unforeseen event

Object Detection in 20 Years: A Survey

Object detection, as of one the most fundamental and challenging problems in computer vision, has received great attention in recent years. Its development in the past two decades can be regarded as an epitome of computer vision history. If we think of today's object detection as a technical aesthetics under the power of deep learning, then turning back the clock 20 years we would witness the wisdom of cold weapon era. This paper extensively reviews 400+ papers of object detection in the light of its technical evolution, spanning over a quarter-century's time (from the 1990s to 2019). A number of topics have been covered in this paper, including the milestone detectors in history, detection datasets, metrics, fundamental building blocks of the detection system, speed up techniques, and the recent state of the art detection methods. This paper also reviews some important detection applications, such as pedestrian detection, face detection, text detection, etc, and makes an in-deep analysis of their challenges as well as technical improvements in recent years.Comment: This work has been submitted to the IEEE TPAMI for possible publicatio

Attend Refine Repeat: Active Box Proposal Generation via In-Out Localization

The problem of computing category agnostic bounding box proposals is utilized as a core component in many computer vision tasks and thus has lately attracted a lot of attention. In this work we propose a new approach to tackle this problem that is based on an active strategy for generating box proposals that starts from a set of seed boxes, which are uniformly distributed on the image, and then progressively moves its attention on the promising image areas where it is more likely to discover well localized bounding box proposals. We call our approach AttractioNet and a core component of it is a CNN-based category agnostic object location refinement module that is capable of yielding accurate and robust bounding box predictions regardless of the object category. We extensively evaluate our AttractioNet approach on several image datasets (i.e. COCO, PASCAL, ImageNet detection and NYU-Depth V2 datasets) reporting on all of them state-of-the-art results that surpass the previous work in the field by a significant margin and also providing strong empirical evidence that our approach is capable to generalize to unseen categories. Furthermore, we evaluate our AttractioNet proposals in the context of the object detection task using a VGG16-Net based detector and the achieved detection performance on COCO manages to significantly surpass all other VGG16-Net based detectors while even being competitive with a heavily tuned ResNet-101 based detector. Code as well as box proposals computed for several datasets are available at:: https://github.com/gidariss/AttractioNet.Comment: Technical report. Code as well as box proposals computed for several datasets are available at:: https://github.com/gidariss/AttractioNe