Anchor box optimization for object detection

Yuanyi Zhong, Jianfeng Wang, Jian Peng, Lei Zhang

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a general approach to optimize anchor boxes for object detection. Nowadays, anchor boxes are widely adopted in state-of-the-art detection frameworks. However, these frameworks usually pre-define anchor box shapes in heuristic ways and fix the sizes during training. To improve the accuracy and reduce the effort of designing anchor boxes, we propose to dynamically learn the anchor shapes, which allows the anchors to automatically adapt to the data distribution and the network learning capability. The learning approach can be easily implemented with stochastic gradient descent and can be plugged into any anchor box-based detection framework. The extra training cost is almost negligible and it has no impact on the inference time or memory cost. Exhaustive experiments demonstrate that the proposed anchor optimization method consistently achieves significant improvement (≥ 1% mAP absolute gain) over the baseline methods on several benchmark datasets including Pascal VOC 07+12, MS COCO and Brainwash. Meanwhile, the robustness is also verified towards different anchor initialization methods and the number of anchor shapes, which greatly simplifies the problem of anchor box design.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2020 IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision, WACV 2020
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages1275-1283
Number of pages9
ISBN (Electronic)9781728165530
DOIs
StatePublished - Mar 2020
Event2020 IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision, WACV 2020 - Snowmass Village, United States
Duration: Mar 1 2020Mar 5 2020

Publication series

NameProceedings - 2020 IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision, WACV 2020

Conference

Conference2020 IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision, WACV 2020
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySnowmass Village
Period3/1/203/5/20

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Science Applications
  • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

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