Mixture-Model-based Bounding Box Density Estimation for Object Detection

In this paper, we propose a new object detection model, Mixture-Model-based Object Detector (MMOD), that performs multi-object detection using a mixture model. Unlike previous studies, we use density estimation to deal with the multi-object detection task. MMOD captures the conditional distribution of bounding boxes for a given input image using a mixture model consisting of Gaussian and categorical distributions. For this purpose, we propose a method to extract object bounding boxes from a trained mixture model. In doing so, we also propose a new network structure and objective function for the MMOD. Our proposed method is not trained by assigning a ground truth bounding box to a specific location on the network's output. Instead, the mixture components are automatically learned to represent the distribution of the bounding box through density estimation. Therefore, MMOD does not require a large number of anchors and does not incur the positive-negative imbalance problem. This not only benefits the detection performance but also enhances the inference speed without requiring additional processing. We applied MMOD to Pascal VOC and MS COCO datasets, and outperform the detection performance with inference speed of other state-of-the-art fast object detection methods. (38.7 AP with 39ms per image on MS COCO without bells and whistles.) Code will be available.