Speed and accuracy trade-offs for modern convolutional object detectors

The goal of this paper is to serve as a guide for selecting a detection architecture that achieves the right speed/memory/accuracy balance for a given application and platform. To this end we investigate various ways to trade accuracy for speed and memory usage in modern convolutional object detection systems. A number of successful systems have been proposed in recent years, but apples-to-apples comparisons are difficult due to different base feature extractors (e.g., VGG, Residual Networks), different default image resolutions, as well as different hardware and software platforms. We present a unified implementation of the Faster R-CNN~\cite{ren2015faster}, R-FCN~\cite{dai2016r} and SSD~\cite{liu2015ssd} systems, which we view as ``meta-architectures'' and trace out the speed/accuracy trade-off curve created by using alternative feature extractors and varying other critical parameters such as image size within each of these meta-architectures. On one extreme end of this spectrum where speed and memory are critical, we present a detector that runs at over 50 frames per second and can be deployed on a mobile device. On the opposite end in which accuracy is critical, we present a detector that achieves state-of-the-art performance measured on the COCO detection task.

• Machine Perception