Deformable Template Network (DTN) for Object Detection
Shuai Wu, Yong Xu, Bob Zhang, Jian Yang, David Zhang
Abstract
Objects often have different appearances because of viewpoint changes or part deformation. How to reasonably model these variations is still a big challenge for object detection. In this paper, we propose a novel Deformable Template Network (DTN), which exploits the pictorial structure to model possible variations of an object. DTN represents an object by virtue of a generated template in a deformable way. It has two key modules: the template generating module and the part matching module. The template generating module produces a template for a given object which defines the anchor positions of the <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$k{\times }k$</tex-math></inline-formula> parts. Based on such a template, the part matching module aims to perform part alignment around the anchor positions. In terms of each part, the matching process makes a trade-off between maximizing the detection score and minimizing the deformation cost relative to the anchor position. Moreover, DTN is a fully convolutional network which means it is competitive in terms of detection efficiency. We evaluate DTN on both the PASCAL VOC and MSCOCO datasets, achieving the state-of-the-art results, an accuracy of 82.7% for PASCAL VOC and of 44.9% for MSCOCO.