Sparse R-CNN: An End-to-End Framework for Object Detection
Peize Sun, Rufeng Zhang, Yi Jiang, Tao Kong, Chenfeng Xu, Wei Zhan, Masayoshi Tomizuka, Zehuan Yuan, Ping Luo
Abstract
Object detection serves as one of most fundamental computer vision tasks. Existing works on object detection heavily rely on dense object candidates, such as k anchor boxes pre-defined on all grids of an image feature map of size H×W. In this paper, we present Sparse R-CNN, a very simple and sparse method for object detection in images. In our method, a fixed sparse set of learned object proposals ( N in total) are provided to the object recognition head to perform classification and localization. By replacing HWk (up to hundreds of thousands) hand-designed object candidates with N (e.g., 100) learnable proposals, Sparse R-CNN makes all efforts related to object candidates design and one-to-many label assignment completely obsolete. More importantly, Sparse R-CNN directly outputs predictions without the non-maximum suppression (NMS) post-processing procedure. Thus, it establishes an end-to-end object detection framework. Sparse R-CNN demonstrates highly competitive accuracy, run-time and training convergence performance with the well-established detector baselines on the challenging COCO dataset and CrowdHuman dataset. We hope that our work can inspire re-thinking the convention of dense prior in object detectors and designing new high-performance detectors.