Soft Anchor-Point Object Detection

摘要：

本文提出了一个速度和精度权衡的detector。主要研究两个问题？
how to make the anchor-free detection head better?
how to utilize the power of feature pyramid better?
分别提出两种训练策略：soften optimization techniques，
1）soft-weighted anchor points
2）soft-selected pyramid levels

实验表明，我们简洁的SAPD将速度/精度权衡提升到了一个新的水平，COCO上获得a single-model single-scale AP of 47.4%，5xfaster than other detectors.
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目标检测分为anchor-base和anchor-free，anchor-free主要分为两大类，anchor-point和key-point检测。

Anchor-point方法：

将bounding box根据point-to-boundary distance编解码成anchor points 这些anchor point=pixel on pyramid feature maps并具有相应的距离信息。
优点：1.框架简单 2.训练速度快 3.backbone增大有帮助 4. flexible feature level selection
缺点：same image scale ->low mAP

Key-point方法：

预测bounding box的关键点。
优点：input image size small-> high mAP
缺点：下采样不能过多，需要single high-resolution and repeat bottom-down ，down-bottom in processing.因此FLOPs大，训练时间长，计算内存消耗大，对预先练backbone兼容性差。

没有DCN（deformable convolution）5x faster
有DCN（deformable convolution）high mAP

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一般的Anchor-point detector模型框架

1.Feature Pyramid 中l代表input-size*(1/sl),sl=2**l
2.Head中有两个子网络，分类（每个anchor-point输出K类的可能性）和回归（4个值)

3.Supervision targets：Plij表示在第l层，（i，j）坐标的特征， i = 0,1,…,W/sl − 1 j = 0,1,…,H/sl −1. Each plij has a corresponding image space location (Xlij,Ylij) where Xlij = sl(i + 0.5) and Ylij = sl(j + 0.5)。
正样本判断：ground-truth B = (c,x,y,w,h)，中心收缩Bv = (c,x,y,ew,eh), 只有在BV里面才是positive。
最后归一化的left，top，right，behind的坐标为：

4. Loss functions ：focal-loss 分类，IOU-loss 回归

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两个创新策略

1.SW（soft-weight ）

权重公式：yita控制下降步伐。

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2.ss（soft-select）

Instance-dependent经过每层level->ROI Align->concat->经过meta-selection network-> a vector

The meta-selection network is jointly trained with the detector. Cross entropy loss is used for optimization and the ground-truth is a one hot vector indicating which pyramid level has minimal loss as defined in the FSAF module

Loss

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消融实验

结果表明，对于金字塔级别更高的实例，更大的实例往往被赋予更高的权重。大多数事例不超过两层就可以学会。非常罕见的实例需要超过两层，例如图7右上角的沙发子图。这与表4中的结果一致。

Joint training of the meta-selection network has a negligible effect on performance.
有人认为是因为多任务训练产生优异的表现，但是本文只是用训练进行联合训练，验证并没有使用权重，换句话说特征选择策略 Is the same as the baseline FSAF module

SAPD is robust and efficient
修改backbone很容易提高AP，AR
并且和anchor-base方法进行比较，实验表明
SAPD不仅跑的快（因为head 结构简单）
并且精准率高（即使是anchor-base和anchor-free方法结合
by significant margins）

Without DCN, our fastest SAPD version based on ResNet-50 can reach a 14.9 FPS while maintaining a 41.7% AP
With DCN, our SAPD forms an upper envelope of recent state-of-the-art anchor-based and anchor-free detectors

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补充

FSAF