Reducing Label Noise in Anchor-Free Object Detection
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Current anchor-free object detectors label all the features that spatially fall inside a predefined central region of a ground-truth box as positive. This approach causes label noise during training, since some of these positively labeled features may be on the background or an occluder object, or they are simply not discriminative features. In this paper, we propose a new labeling strategy aimed to reduce the label noise in anchor-free detectors. We sum-pool predictions stemming from individual features into a single prediction. This allows the model to reduce the contributions of non-discriminatory features during training. We develop a new one-stage, anchor-free object detector, PPDet, to employ this labeling strategy during training and a similar prediction pooling method during inference. On the COCO dataset, PPDet achieves the best performance among anchor-free top-down detectors and performs on-par with the other state-of-the-art methods. It also outperforms all state-of-the-art methods in the detection of small objects (AP_S 31.4). Code is available at https://github.com/nerminsamet/ppdet
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