We propose a fully convolutional one-stage object detector (FCOS) to solve object detection in a per-pixel prediction fashion, analogue to semantic segmentation. Almost all state-of-the-art object detectors such as RetinaNet, SSD, YOLOv3, and Faster R-CNN rely on pre-defined anchor boxes. In contrast, our proposed detector FCOS is anchor box free, as well as proposal free. By eliminating the pre-defined set of anchor boxes, FCOS completely avoids the complicated computation related to anchor boxes such as calculating overlapping during training. More importantly, we also avoid all hyper-parameters related to anchor boxes, which are often very sensitive to the final detection performance. With the only post-processing non-maximum suppression (NMS), FCOS with ResNeXt-64x4d-101 achieves 44.7% in AP with single-model and single-scale testing, surpassing previous one-stage detectors with the advantage of being much simpler. For the first time, we demonstrate a much simpler and flexible detection framework achieving improved detection accuracy. We hope that the proposed FCOS framework can serve as a simple and strong alternative for many other instance-level tasks. Code is available at: https://tinyurl.com/FCOSv1

/pdf/fcos-fully-convolutional-one-stage-object-detection-1rty781yqh.pdf

FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection

We propose a fully convolutional one-stage object detector (FCOS) to solve object detection in a per-pixel prediction fashion, analogue to semantic segmentation. Almost all state-of-the-art object detectors such as RetinaNet, SSD, YOLOv3, and Faster R-CNN rely on pre-defined anchor boxes. In contrast, our proposed detector FCOS is anchor box free, as well as proposal free. By eliminating the predefined set of anchor boxes, FCOS completely avoids the complicated computation related to anchor boxes such as calculating overlapping during training. More importantly, we also avoid all hyper-parameters related to anchor boxes, which are often very sensitive to the final detection performance. With the only post-processing non-maximum suppression (NMS), FCOS with ResNeXt-64x4d-101 achieves 44.7% in AP with single-model and single-scale testing, surpassing previous one-stage detectors with the advantage of being much simpler. For the first time, we demonstrate a much simpler and flexible detection framework achieving improved detection accuracy. We hope that the proposed FCOS framework can serve as a simple and strong alternative for many other instance-level tasks. Code is available at:Code is available at: this https URL

We address the problem of real-time 3D object detection from point clouds in the context of autonomous driving. Speed is critical as detection is a necessary component for safety. Existing approaches are, however, expensive in computation due to high dimensionality of point clouds. We utilize the 3D data more efficiently by representing the scene from the Bird's Eye View (BEV), and propose PIXOR, a proposal-free, single-stage detector that outputs oriented 3D object estimates decoded from pixel-wise neural network predictions. The input representation, network architecture, and model optimization are specially designed to balance high accuracy and real-time efficiency. We validate PIXOR on two datasets: the KITTI BEV object detection benchmark, and a large-scale 3D vehicle detection benchmark. In both datasets we show that the proposed detector surpasses other state-of-the-art methods notably in terms of Average Precision (AP), while still runs at 10 FPS.

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PIXOR: Real-time 3D Object Detection from Point Clouds

The rapid uptake of mobile devices and the rising popularity of mobile applications and services pose unprecedented demands on mobile and wireless networking infrastructure. Upcoming 5G systems are evolving to support exploding mobile traffic volumes, real-time extraction of fine-grained analytics, and agile management of network resources, so as to maximize user experience. Fulfilling these tasks is challenging, as mobile environments are increasingly complex, heterogeneous, and evolving. One potential solution is to resort to advanced machine learning techniques, in order to help manage the rise in data volumes and algorithm-driven applications. The recent success of deep learning underpins new and powerful tools that tackle problems in this space. In this paper, we bridge the gap between deep learning and mobile and wireless networking research, by presenting a comprehensive survey of the crossovers between the two areas. We first briefly introduce essential background and state-of-the-art in deep learning techniques with potential applications to networking. We then discuss several techniques and platforms that facilitate the efficient deployment of deep learning onto mobile systems. Subsequently, we provide an encyclopedic review of mobile and wireless networking research based on deep learning, which we categorize by different domains. Drawing from our experience, we discuss how to tailor deep learning to mobile environments. We complete this survey by pinpointing current challenges and open future directions for research.

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Deep Learning in Mobile and Wireless Networking: A Survey

Object detection, as of one the most fundamental and challenging problems in computer vision, has received great attention in recent years. Its development in the past two decades can be regarded as an epitome of computer vision history. If we think of today's object detection as a technical aesthetics under the power of deep learning, then turning back the clock 20 years we would witness the wisdom of cold weapon era. This paper extensively reviews 400+ papers of object detection in the light of its technical evolution, spanning over a quarter-century's time (from the 1990s to 2019). A number of topics have been covered in this paper, including the milestone detectors in history, detection datasets, metrics, fundamental building blocks of the detection system, speed up techniques, and the recent state of the art detection methods. This paper also reviews some important detection applications, such as pedestrian detection, face detection, text detection, etc, and makes an in-deep analysis of their challenges as well as technical improvements in recent years.

Object Detection in 20 Years: A Survey

Previous approaches for scene text detection have already achieved promising performances across various benchmarks. However, they usually fall short when dealing with challenging scenarios, even when equipped with deep neural network models, because the overall performance is determined by the interplay of multiple stages and components in the pipelines. In this work, we propose a simple yet powerful pipeline that yields fast and accurate text detection in natural scenes. The pipeline directly predicts words or text lines of arbitrary orientations and quadrilateral shapes in full images, eliminating unnecessary intermediate steps (e.g., candidate aggregation and word partitioning), with a single neural network. The simplicity of our pipeline allows concentrating efforts on designing loss functions and neural network architecture. Experiments on standard datasets including ICDAR 2015, COCO-Text and MSRA-TD500 demonstrate that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of both accuracy and efficiency. On the ICDAR 2015 dataset, the proposed algorithm achieves an F-score of 0.7820 at 13.2fps at 720p resolution.

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EAST: An Efficient and Accurate Scene Text Detector

In this paper, we introduce NBNet, a novel framework for image denoising. Unlike previous works, we propose to tackle this challenging problem from a new perspective: noise reduction by image-adaptive projection. Specifically, we propose to train a network that can separate signal and noise by learning a set of reconstruction basis in the feature space. Subsequently, image denosing can be achieved by selecting corresponding basis of the signal subspace and projecting the input into such space. Our key insight is that projection can naturally maintain the local structure of input signal, especially for areas with low light or weak textures. Towards this end, we propose SSA, a non-local attention module we design to explicitly learn the basis generation as well as subspace projection. We further incorporate SSA with NBNet, a UNet structured network designed for end-to-end image denosing based. We conduct evaluations on benchmarks, including SIDD and DND, and NBNet achieves state-of-the-art performance on PSNR and SSIM with significantly less computational cost.

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NBNet: Noise Basis Learning for Image Denoising with Subspace Projection

Quantized neural networks (QNNs), which use low bitwidth numbers for representing parameters and performing computations, have been proposed to reduce the computation complexity, storage size and memory usage. In QNNs, parameters and activations are uniformly quantized, such that the multiplications and additions can be accelerated by bitwise operations. However, distributions of parameters in neural networks are often imbalanced, such that the uniform quantization determined from extremal values may underutilize available bitwidth. In this paper, we propose a novel quantization method that can ensure the balance of distributions of quantized values. Our method first recursively partitions the parameters by percentiles into balanced bins, and then applies uniform quantization. We also introduce computationally cheaper approximations of percentiles to reduce the computation overhead introduced. Overall, our method improves the prediction accuracies of QNNs without introducing extra computation during inference, has negligible impact on training speed, and is applicable to both convolutional neural networks and recurrent neural networks. Experiments on standard datasets including ImageNet and Penn Treebank confirm the effectiveness of our method. On ImageNet, the top-5 error rate of our 4-bit quantized GoogLeNet model is 12.7%, which is superior to the state-of-the-arts of QNNs.

Balanced Quantization: An Effective and Efficient Approach to Quantized Neural Networks

Deep learning-based image denoising approaches have been extensively studied in recent years, prevailing in many public benchmark datasets. However, the stat-of-the-art networks are computationally too expensive to be directly applied on mobile devices. In this work, we propose a light-weight, efficient neural network-based raw image denoiser that runs smoothly on mainstream mobile devices, and produces high quality denoising results. Our key insights are twofold: (1) by measuring and estimating sensor noise level, a smaller network trained on synthetic sensor-specific data can out-perform larger ones trained on general data; (2) the large noise level variation under different ISO settings can be removed by a novel k-Sigma Transform, allowing a small network to efficiently handle a wide range of noise levels. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of our approach. Our proposed mobile-friendly denoising model runs at \(\sim \)70 ms per megapixel on Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 chipset, and it is the basis of the night shot feature of several flagship smartphones released in 2019.

Yuzhi Wang

Papers

EAST: An Efficient and Accurate Scene Text Detector

EAST: An Efficient and Accurate Scene Text Detector

NBNet: Noise Basis Learning for Image Denoising with Subspace Projection

Balanced Quantization: An Effective and Efficient Approach to Quantized Neural Networks

Practical Deep Raw Image Denoising on Mobile Devices