Exploring Classification Equilibrium in Long-Tailed Object Detection

Chengjian Feng
Intellifusion Inc.
Yujie Zhong
Meituan Inc.
Weilin Huang
Tao Technology, Alibaba Group

ICCV 2021

ArXiv | Code | Bibtex

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Abstract

The conventional detectors tend to make imbalanced classification and suffer performance drop, when the distribution of the training data is severely skewed. In this paper, we propose to use the mean classification score to indicate the classification accuracy for each category during training. Based on this indicator, we balance the classification via an Equilibrium Loss (EBL) and a Memory-augmented Feature Sampling (MFS) method. Specifically, EBL increases the intensity of the adjustment of the decision boundary for the weak classes by a designed score-guided loss margin between any two classes. On the other hand, MFS improves the frequency and accuracy of the adjustments of the decision boundary for the weak classes through over-sampling the instance features of those classes. Therefore, EBL and MFS work collaboratively for finding the classification equilibrium in long-tailed detection, and dramatically improve the performance of tail classes while maintaining or even improving the performance of head classes. We conduct experiments on LVIS using Mask R-CNN with various backbones including ResNet-50-FPN and ResNet-101-FPN to show the superiority of the proposed method. It improves the detection performance of tail classes by 15.6 AP, and outperforms the most recent long-tailed object detectors by more than 1 AP.


Results

Compare with SOTA long-tailed object detectors on LVIS v0.5 and LVIS v1.0. LOCE surpasses the most recent long-tailed object detectors such as BAGS, Seesaw Loss and EQL v2.


Visualizations

Analysis of classification equilibrium between different training methods on LVIS v1.0 val set. LOCE performs more balanced classification and achieves higher classification accuracy of both common classes and tail classes, than the other two methods.
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Publication

C. Feng, Y Zhong, W. Huang
Exploring Classification Equilibrium in Long-Tailed Object Detection
ICCV 2021
ArXiv | Code | Bibtex





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