OTA: Optimal Transport Assignment for Object Detection

Zheng Ge, Songtao Liu*, Zeming Li, Osamu Yoshie, Jian Sun

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

79 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Recent advances in label assignment in object detection mainly seek to independently define positive/negative training samples for each ground-truth (gt) object. In this paper, we innovatively revisit the label assignment from a global perspective and propose to formulate the assigning procedure as an Optimal Transport (OT) problem - a well-studied topic in Optimization Theory. Concretely, we define the unit transportation cost between each demander (anchor) and supplier (gt) pair as the weighted summation of their classification and regression losses. After formulation, finding the best assignment solution is converted to solve the optimal transport plan at minimal transportation costs, which can be solved via Sinkhorn-Knopp Iteration. On COCO, a single FCOS-ResNet-50 detector equipped with Optimal Transport Assignment (OTA) can reach 40.7% mAP under 1× scheduler, outperforming all other existing assigning methods. Extensive experiments conducted on COCO and CrowdHuman further validate the effectiveness of our proposed OTA, especially its superiority in crowd scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/Megvii-BaseDetection/OTA.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2021 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2021
PublisherIEEE Computer Society
Pages303-312
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9781665445092
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2021
Event2021 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2021 - Virtual, Online, United States
Duration: 2021 Jun 192021 Jun 25

Publication series

NameProceedings of the IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
ISSN (Print)1063-6919

Conference

Conference2021 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2021
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityVirtual, Online
Period21/6/1921/6/25

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

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