Spatial Pyramid Pooling in Deep Convolutional Networks for Visual Recognition

TLDR: This work equips the networks with another pooling strategy, “spatial pyramid pooling”, to eliminate the above requirement, and develops a new network structure, called SPP-net, which can generate a fixed-length representation regardless of image size/scale.

Abstract: Existing deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) require a fixed-size (e.g. 224×224) input image. This requirement is “artificial” and may hurt the recognition accuracy for the images or sub-images of an arbitrary size/scale. In this work, we equip the networks with a more principled pooling strategy, “spatial pyramid pooling”, to eliminate the above requirement. The new network structure, called SPP-net, can generate a fixed-length representation regardless of image size/scale. By removing the fixed-size limitation, we can improve all CNN-based image classification methods in general. Our SPP-net achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on the datasets of ImageNet 2012, Pascal VOC 2007, and Caltech101.