Deformable Part Region Learning for Object Detection

In a convolutional object detector, the detection accuracy can be degraded often due to the low feature discriminability caused by geometric variation or transformation of an object. In this paper, we propose a deformable part region learning in order to allow decomposed part regions to be deformable according to geometric transformation of an object. To this end, we introduce trainable geometric parameters for the location of each part model. Because the ground truth of the part models is not available, we design classification and mask losses for part models, and learn the geometric parameters by minimizing an integral loss including those part losses. As a result, we can train a deformable part region network without extra super-vision and make each part model deformable according to object scale variation. Furthermore, for improving cascade object detection and instance segmentation, we present a Cascade deformable part region architecture which can refine whole and part detections iteratively in the cascade manner. Without bells and whistles, our implementation of a Cascade deformable part region detector achieves better detection and segmentation mAPs on COCO and VOC datasets, compared to the recent cascade and other state-of-the-art detectors.