This is the Faster R-CNN paper. It improves over Fast R-CNN and R-CNN in the sense that region proposals are generated from the image. It combines a region proposal network (RPN) with the Fast R-CNN detection network so the convolutional network part is shared. It eliminated the use of region proposal algorithms such as Selective Search or EdgeBoxes.

Region Proposal Network

RPN is a fully convolutional network (FCN). It simultaneously regress region bonds and objectness scores at each location on a regular grid.

It operates on an image (of any size) and outpus a set of rectangular object proposals, each with an objectness score. The paper built the RPN based on ZF-net (5 shareable convolutional layers) or VGG-16 (13 shareable convolutional layers). An input image transformed into output feature map by the ConvNet. Then an $$n\times n$$ spatial window ($$n=3$$) is sliding on the feature map and produce a feature vector (256-dim for ZF-net and 512-dim for VGG-16, with ReLU activation). The feature vector is then feed into two sibling fully connected layers (implemented as 1×1 conv layers), one for box regression and another for box classification.

At each sliding window location, $$k$$ region proposals are predicted. The output of the classification layer is $$2k$$ scores to product the probability of foreground object or background. The regression layer outputs $$4k$$ encoding, 4 for each region bounding box, and the regression weight of each box is not shared. The regions are derived from anchors (i.e., primitive bounding boxes from which refined into the final region bounding boxes). An anchor is at the centre of the sliding window (usually at centre of a square pixel for odd $$n$$). The paper used 3 scales and 3 aspect ratios, yielding $$k=9$$ anchors at each position. For a feature map of $$H\times W$$ there would be $$HWk$$ anchors in total.

The approach in this paper creates a pyramid of anchors, in which anchors of different (i.e., 3) scales are stacked together at the same centre. The input and ConvNet depends on image of only one scale until at the final classification and regression layers.

The detail of the network architecture is as follows:

• Input image: Resized to shorter side as 600 pixels
• VGG-16 or ZF-net is used, which the last convolutional layer output has a stride size of 16 (i.e., 16 pixels in the input image contributed to 1 pixel at the output feature map)
• For 3 scales of anchors, the areas are fixed to $$128^2$$, $$256^2$$, and $$512^2$$ pixels
• The 3 aspect ratios of anchors are 1:1, 1:2, and 2:1. That is, for pixel are of $$N^2$$, the anchors are $$N\times N$$, $$N/\sqrt{2}\times 2N/\sqrt{2}$$, and $$2N/\sqrt{2}\times N/\sqrt{2}$$

Loss Function for RPN

The RPN only predicts a bounding box for its objectness. Therefore, each anchor is assigned a binary classification label.

An anchor is positive if (1) the anchor has IoU $$\ge 0.7$$ with any ground-truth bounding box, or in case not found, (2) the anchor has highest IoU to a ground-truth bounding box. Any single ground-truth bounding box may assign positive labels to multiple anchors.

An anchor is negative if IoU $$\le 0.3$$ for all ground-truth boxes. If an anchor is neither positive nor negative, it is not contributed to the loss function computation in training.

The loss function for an image is

$L(\{p_i\}, \{t_i\}) = \frac{1}{N_{\text{cls}}} \sum_i L_{\text{cls}}(p_i, p_i^ast) + \lambda \frac{1}{N_{\text{reg}}} \sum_i p_i^\ast L_{\text{reg}}(t_i, t_i^\ast)$

where

• $$i$$ is index of an anchor in a mini-batch
• $$p_i$$ is the predicted probability of anchor $$i$$ being an object
• $$p_i^\ast\in\{0,1\}$$ is the objectness ground-truth (only for positive and negative anchors)
• $$t_i,t_i^\ast$$ are the 4 parameterized coordinates of the bounding box, predicted and ground-truth respectively: (subscript $$a$$ refers to anchor and superscript $$\ast$$ refers to ground-truth)
\begin{aligned} t_x &= (x-x_a)/w_a & t_y &= (y-y_a)/h_a \\ t_x^\ast &= (x^\ast-x_a)/w_a & t_y^\ast &= (y^\ast-y_a)/h_a \\ t_w &= \log(w/w_a) & t_h &= \log(h/h_a) \\ t_w^\ast &= \log(w^\ast/w_a) & t_h^\ast &= \log(h^\ast/h_a) \end{aligned}
• $$L_{\text{cls}}()$$ is the log loss for binary classification
• $$L_{\text{reg}}()$$ is the smooth L1 loss for regression, as used in Fast R-CNN; $$p_i^\ast L_{\text{reg}}()$$ denotes regression applies only to positive anchors
• $$N_{\text{cls}}=256$$ is the size of the mini-batch
• $$N_{\text{reg}}\approx 2400$$ is the number of anchor locations
• $$\lambda=10$$ is the balancing parameter, to make classification loss and regression loss roughly equally weighted

Note that each pixel at feature map produces $$k$$ anchors but those anchors that go beyond image boundary are excluded from the loss calculation. An input image of 1000×600 pixels with convolution output at stride 16 produces roughly 60×40×9=20K anchors but after cross-boundary removal, only 6K anchors are left.

The training is based on SGD. In each mini-batch, 256 anchors are drawn from a single image with random sample of 128 positive and 128 negative anchors. If there are not enough positive anchors, the mini-batch is padded with more negative anchors. The conv layers are initialized with ImageNet classification. Learning rate of 1e-3 is used for first 60K mini-batches and then 1e-4 for next 20K mini-batches. Momentum of 0.9 and weight decay of 5e-4 are used. In case VGG-16 is used for RPN, the layers before “conv3_1” are marked not trainable.

Alternating Training

The convolutional network in Faster R-CNN is shared between the RPN (which outputs refined bounding boxes from anchors and their objectness) and the Fast R-CNN parts (which takes the bounding boxes from RPN as region proposals and run RoI pooling, classification, and bounding box regression). There are multiple ways to train this shared convolutional network:

1. Alternating training: Train the RPN with ImageNet-initialized CNN, then use the proposal from RPN to train Fast R-CNN, and use the CNN fine-tuned by Fast R-CNN to retrain the RPN. This process repeats.
2. Approximate join training: Make RPN and Fast R-CNN one network in training. At each SGD step, the forward pass generates region proposals from RPN and treated as fixed proposals to Fast R-CNN detector. The backward process propagates loss from the detector and RPN. At the shared layers, the loss are combined.
• In this case, the loss at detector assumes RPN output are constant and not adjustable. Hence ignores the derivative of detector loss w.r.t. RPN output
3. Non-approximate join training: Consider the combined RPN and Fast R-CNN network and includes the derivative of detector loss w.r.t. RPN output
• requires the RoI pooling layer that is differentiable w.r.t. RPN box coordinates, e.g. RoI wrapping layer

This paper uses 4-step training algorithm: (1) First train the RPN initialized with ImageNet weights. (2) Then train a separate Fast R-CNN detection network assuming RPN input as non-adjustable box coordinates. These two networks are separate and the convolutional layers are not shared. (3) Afterwards, the detector network’s weight are used to initialize RPN again on the shared layers. These shared layers are frozen and only the layers unique to RPN are fine-tuned. (4) At the Fast R-CNN, the shared convolutional layers are keep frozen and the other layers are fine-tuned once again.

The 4-step training algorithm can be repeated but the paper found the improvement is negligible.

Inference

At inference, the anchors generated by RPN will have the cross-boundary proposals boxes clipped to the image boundary.

Bibliographic data

@inproceedings{
title = "Faster R-CNN. Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks",
author = "Shaoquing Ren and Kaiming He and Ross Girshick and Jian Sun",
booktitle = "Proc NIPS",
month = "Jan",
year = "2016",
note = "arXiv:1506.01497",
}