Detection in Crowded Scenes: One Proposal, Multiple Predictions

We propose a simple yet effective proposal-based object detector, aiming at detecting highly-overlapped instances in crowded scenes. The key of our approach is to let each proposal predict a set of correlated instances rather than a single one in previous proposal-based frameworks. Equipped with new techniques such as EMD Loss and Set NMS, our detector can effectively handle the difficulty of detecting highly overlapped objects. On a FPN-Res50 baseline, our detector can obtain 4.9\% AP gains on challenging CrowdHuman dataset and 1.0\% $\text{MR}^{-2}$ improvements on CityPersons dataset, without bells and whistles. Moreover, on less crowed datasets like COCO, our approach can still achieve moderate improvement, suggesting the proposed method is robust to crowdedness.