FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection

Zhi Tian, Chunhua Shen, Hao Chen, Tong He; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019, pp. 9627-9636

Abstract


We propose a fully convolutional one-stage object detector (FCOS) to solve object detection in a per-pixel prediction fashion, analogue to semantic segmentation. Almost all state-of-the-art object detectors such as RetinaNet, SSD, YOLOv3, and Faster R-CNN rely on pre-defined anchor boxes. In contrast, our proposed detector FCOS is anchor box free, as well as proposal free. By eliminating the pre-defined set of anchor boxes, FCOS completely avoids the complicated computation related to anchor boxes such as calculating overlapping during training. More importantly, we also avoid all hyper-parameters related to anchor boxes, which are often very sensitive to the final detection performance. With the only post-processing non-maximum suppression (NMS), FCOS with ResNeXt-64x4d-101 achieves 44.7% in AP with single-model and single-scale testing, surpassing previous one-stage detectors with the advantage of being much simpler. For the first time, we demonstrate a much simpler and flexible detection framework achieving improved detection accuracy. We hope that the proposed FCOS framework can serve as a simple and strong alternative for many other instance-level tasks. Code is available at: https://tinyurl.com/FCOSv1

Related Material


[pdf]
[bibtex]
@InProceedings{Tian_2019_ICCV,
author = {Tian, Zhi and Shen, Chunhua and Chen, Hao and He, Tong},
title = {FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
month = {October},
year = {2019}
}