Grid R-CNN

This paper proposes a novel object detection framework named Grid R-CNN, which adopts a grid guided localization mechanism for accurate object detection. Different from the traditional regression based methods, the Grid R-CNN captures the spatial information explicitly and enjoys the position sensitive property of fully convolutional architecture. Instead of using only two independent points, we design a multi-point supervision formulation to encode more clues in order to reduce the impact of inaccurate prediction of specific points. To take the full advantage of the correlation of points in a grid, we propose a two-stage information fusion strategy to fuse feature maps of neighbor grid points. The grid guided localization approach is easy to be extended to different state-of-the-art detection frameworks. Grid R-CNN leads to high quality object localization, and experiments demonstrate that it achieves a 4.1% AP gain at IoU=0.8 and a 10.0% AP gain at IoU=0.9 on COCO benchmark compared to Faster R-CNN with Res50 backbone and FPN architecture.