DR Loss: Improving Object Detection by Distributional Ranking

Most of object detection algorithms can be categorized into two classes: two-stage detectors and one-stage detectors. For two-stage detectors, a region proposal phase can filter massive background candidates in the first stage and it masks the classification task more balanced in the second stage. Recently, one-stage detectors have attracted much attention due to its simple yet effective architecture. Different from two-stage detectors, one-stage detectors have to identify foreground objects from all candidates in a single stage. This architecture is efficient but can suffer from the imbalance issue with respect to two aspects: the imbalance between classes and that in the distribution of background, where only a few candidates are hard to be identified. In this work, we propose to address the challenge by developing the distributional ranking (DR) loss. First, we convert the classification problem to a ranking problem to alleviate the class-imbalance problem. Then, we propose to rank the distribution of foreground candidates above that of background ones in the constrained worst-case scenario. This strategy not only handles the imbalance in background candidates but also improves the efficiency for the ranking algorithm. Besides the classification task, we also improve the regression loss by gradually approaching the $L_1$ loss as suggested in interior-point methods. To evaluate the proposed losses, we replace the corresponding losses in RetinaNet that reports the state-of-the-art performance as a one-stage detector. With the ResNet-101 as the backbone, our method can improve mAP on COCO data set from $39.1\%$ to $41.1\%$ by only changing the loss functions and it verifies the effectiveness of the proposed losses.