[Paper note] PVANET: Deep but Lightweight Neural Networks for Real-time Object Detection

• paper
• Author: Kye-Hyeon Kim, Sanghoon Hong, Byungseok Roh, Yeongjae Cheon, and Minje Park
• Intel Imaging and Camera Technology

Highlight

• Speed up (real-time) detection process with a more efficient feature extraction CNN, without lossing too much accuracy.
• This network is smaller and more efficient than ResNet and can be a substitution of the latter.

Main structure

• C.ReLU: Concatenated ReLU in early stage of CNN to reduce the number of computation.
  
  • In early stages, output nodes tend to be paired, i.e. one node’s activation is the opposite of another’s.
  • C.ReLU reduce the output channels by half and concatenate with negation.
• Inception
  
  • Not yet been widely applied.
  • Cost-efficient building block for multi-scale representation.
  • 1x1 Conv can preserve the receptive field of the previous layer.
• Multi-scale representation like HyperNet
  
  • Concatenate the output of the last layer and two intermediate layers, whose size are 2x and 4x of the last layer.
  • Set 2x layer as reference scale, down-scaling (pooing) 4x layer, up-scaling (interpolation) the last layer.

Experiment

• Training details
  
  • Add Batch normalization layers before all ReLU.
  • Plateau detection based learning rate policy.
    
    • Measure the moving average of loss
    • Decide as on-plateau if its improvement is below a threshold.
    • Decrease the learning rate by a constant factor when on-plateau.
  • Number of proposals = 200
• VOC2007 & VOC2012 performance