Bounding Box Regression with Uncertainty for Accurate Object Detection

Large-scale object detection datasets (e.g., MS-COCO) try to define the ground truth bounding boxes as clear as possible. However, we observe that ambiguities are still introduced when labeling the bounding boxes. In this paper, we propose a novel bounding box regression loss for learning bounding box transformation and localization variance together. Our loss greatly improves the localization accuracies of various architectures with nearly no additional computation. The learned localization variance allows us to merge neighboring bounding boxes during non-maximum suppression (NMS), which further improves the localization performance. On MS-COCO, we boost the Average Precision (AP) of VGG-16 Faster R-CNN from 23.6% to 29.1%. More importantly, for ResNet-50-FPN Mask R-CNN, our method improves the AP and AP90 by 1.8% and 6.2% respectively, which significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art bounding box refinement methods. Our code and models are available at: github.com/yihui-he/KL-Loss

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Results from the Paper


Task Dataset Model Metric Name Metric Value Global Rank Result Benchmark
Object Detection COCO test-dev ResNet-50-FPN Mask R-CNN + KL Loss + var voting + soft-NMS box mAP 40.4 # 188
Hardware Burden None # 1
Operations per network pass None # 1
Object Detection PASCAL VOC 2007 VGG-16 + KL Loss + var voting + soft-NMS MAP 71.6% # 22

Methods