Faster R-CNN: Towards real-time object detection with region proposal networks

S Ren, K He, R Girshick, J Sun - IEEE transactions on pattern …, 2016 - ieeexplore.ieee.org
IEEE transactions on pattern analysis and machine intelligence, 2016ieeexplore.ieee.org
State-of-the-art object detection networks depend on region proposal algorithms to
hypothesize object locations. Advances like SPPnet [1] and Fast R-CNN [2] have reduced
the running time of these detection networks, exposing region proposal computation as a
bottleneck. In this work, we introduce a Region Proposal Network (RPN) that shares full-
image convolutional features with the detection network, thus enabling nearly cost-free
region proposals. An RPN is a fully convolutional network that simultaneously predicts …
State-of-the-art object detection networks depend on region proposal algorithms to hypothesize object locations. Advances like SPPnet [1] and Fast R-CNN [2] have reduced the running time of these detection networks, exposing region proposal computation as a bottleneck. In this work, we introduce a Region Proposal Network(RPN) that shares full-image convolutional features with the detection network, thus enabling nearly cost-free region proposals. An RPN is a fully convolutional network that simultaneously predicts object bounds and objectness scores at each position. The RPN is trained end-to-end to generate high-quality region proposals, which are used by Fast R-CNN for detection. We further merge RPN and Fast R-CNN into a single network by sharing their convolutional features-using the recently popular terminology of neural networks with 'attention' mechanisms, the RPN component tells the unified network where to look. For the very deep VGG-16 model [3], our detection system has a frame rate of 5 fps (including all steps) on a GPU, while achieving state-of-the-art object detection accuracy on PASCAL VOC 2007, 2012, and MS COCO datasets with only 300 proposals per image. In ILSVRC and COCO 2015 competitions, Faster R-CNN and RPN are the foundations of the 1st-place winning entries in several tracks. Code has been made publicly available.
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