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

R-CNN minus R

Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have had a major impact in most areas of image understanding, including object category detection. In object detection, methods such as R-CNN have obtained excellent results by integrating CNNs with region proposal generation algorithms such as selective search. In this paper, we investigate the role of proposal generation in CNN-based detectors in order to determine whether it is a necessary modelling component, carrying essential geometric information not contained in the CNN, or whether it is merely a way of accelerating detection. We do so by designing and evaluating a detector that uses a trivial region generation scheme, constant for each image. Combined with SPP, this results in an excellent and fast detector that does not require to process an image with algorithms other than the CNN itself. We also streamline and simplify the training of CNN-based detectors by integrating several learning steps in a single algorithm, as well as by proposing a number of improvements that accelerate detection