DINF: Dynamic Instance Noise Filter for Occluded Pedestrian Detection

Occlusion issue is the biggest challenge in pedestrian detection. RCNN-based detectors extract instance features by cropping rectangle regions of interest in the feature maps. However, the visible pixels of the occluded objects are limited, making the rectangle instance feature mixed with a lot of instance-irrelevant noise information. Besides, by counting the number of instances with different degrees of overlap of CrowdHuman dataset, we find that the number of severely overlapping objects and the number of slightly overlapping objects are unbalanced, which may exacerbate the challenges posed by occlusion issues. Regarding to the noise issue, from the perspective of denoising, an iterable dynamic instance noise filter (DINF) is proposed for the RCNN-based pedestrian detectors to improve the signal-noise ratio of the instance feature. Simulating the wavelet denoising process, we use the instance feature vector to generate dynamic convolutional kernels to transform the RoIs features to a domain in which the near-zero values represent the noise information. Then, soft thresholding with channel-wise adaptive thresholds is applied to convert the near-zero values to zero to filter out noise information. For the imbalance issue, we propose an IoU-Focal factor (IFF) to modulate the contributions of the well-regressed boxes and the bad-regressed boxes to the loss in the training process, paying more attention to the minority severely overlapping objects. Extensive experiments conducted on CrowdHuman and CityPersons demonstrate that our methods can help RCNN-based pedestrian detectors achieve state-of-the-art performance.

TSAA: A Two-Stage Anchor Assignment Method towards Anchor Drift in Crowded Object Detection

Among current anchor-based detectors, a positive anchor box will be intuitively assigned to the object that overlaps it the most. The assigned label to each anchor will directly determine the optimization direction of the corresponding prediction box, including the direction of box regression and category prediction. In our practice of crowded object detection, however, the results show that a positive anchor does not always regress toward the object that overlaps it the most when multiple objects overlap. We name it anchor drift. The anchor drift reflects that the anchor-object matching relation, which is determined by the degree of overlap between anchors and objects, is not always optimal. Conflicts between the fixed matching relation and learned experience in the past training process may cause ambiguous predictions and thus raise the false-positive rate. In this paper, a simple but efficient adaptive two-stage anchor assignment (TSAA) method is proposed. It utilizes the final prediction boxes rather than the fixed anchors to calculate the overlap degree with objects to determine which object to regress for each anchor. The participation of the prediction box makes the anchor-object assignment mechanism adaptive. Extensive experiments are conducted on three classic detectors RetinaNet, Faster-RCNN and YOLOv3 on CrowdHuman and COCO to evaluate the effectiveness of TSAA. The results show that TSAA can significantly improve the detectors' performance without additional computational costs or network structure changes.