Object Proposal Generation With Fully Convolutional Networks

Object proposal generation, as a preprocessing technique, has been widely used in current object detection pipelines to guide the search of objects and avoid exhaustive sliding window search across images. Current object proposals are mostly based on low-level image cues, such as edges and saliency. However, objectness is possibly a high-level semantic concept showing whether one region contains objects. This paper presents a framework utilizing fully convolutional networks (FCNs) to produce object proposal positions and bounding box location refinement with Support Vector Machine (SVM) to further improve proposal localization. Experiments on the PASCAL VOC 2007 show that using high-level semantic object proposals obtained by FCN, the object recall can be improved. An improvement in detection mean average precision is also seen when using our proposals in the Fast R-convolutional neural network framework. In addition, we also demonstrate that our method shows stronger robustness when introduced to image perturbations, e.g., blurring, JPEG compression, and salt and pepper noise. Finally, the generalization capability of our model (trained on the PASCAL VOC 2007) is evaluated and validated by testing on PASCAL VOC 2012 validation set, ILSVRC 2013 validation set, and MS COCO 2014 validation set.