Ross Girshick et al.

in 2013 proposed an architecture called R-CNN (Region-

based CNN) to deal with this challenge of object detection.
This R-CNN architecture uses the selective search algorithm that generates
approximately 2000 region proposals.
These 2000 region proposals are then provided to CNN architecture that
computes CNN features.
These features are then passed in an SVM model to classify the object present in
the region proposal.
Region proposals are simply the smaller regions of the image
that possibly contains the objects we are searching for in the input image.
To reduce the region proposals in the R-CNN
It uses a greedy algorithm called selective search.
Selective search is a greedy algorithm that combines smaller segmented regions
to generate region proposal.

Selective Search is a region proposal algorithm used in object detection.

It is designed to be fast with a very high recall.

It is based on computing hierarchical grouping of similar regions based on

color, texture, size and shape compatibility.

Selective Search starts by over-segmenting the image based on intensity of the

pixels using a graph-based segmentation method

The output of the algorithm is shown here.

The image on the right contains segmented regions represented using solid
colors.

Here we can see

 1. Most of the actual objects in the original image contain 2 or more
segmented parts
2. Region proposals for occluded objects such as the plate covered by the
cup or the cup filled with coffee cannot be generated using this method

If we try to address the first problem by further merging the adjacent regions
similar to each other we will end up with one segmented region covering two
objects.

Perfect segmentation is not our goal here.

We just want to predict many region proposals such that some of them should
have very high overlap with actual objects.

Selective Search algorithm takes these oversegments as initial input and

1. Add all bounding boxes corresponding to segmented parts to the list of

regional proposals
2. Group adjacent segments based on similarity

At each iteration, larger segments are formed and added to the list of region
proposals.

Hence we create region proposals from smaller segments to larger segments

in a bottom-up approach.

This is what we mean by computing “hierarchical” segmentations.

This image shows the initial, middle and last step of the hierarchical
segmentation process.

Let’s dive deeper into how do we calculate the similarity between two regions.

Selective Search uses similarity measures based on color, and texture, size and
shape compatibility.

tells me you won’t be surprised by its name.

4. Understanding Faster RCNN

4.1. Intuition of Faster RCNN
Faster RCNN is the modified version of Fast RCNN. The major difference between them is
that Fast RCNN uses the selective search for generating Regions of Interest, while Faster
RCNN uses “Region Proposal Network”, aka RPN. RPN takes image feature maps as an input
and generates a set of object proposals, each with an objectness score as output.

The below steps are typically followed in a Faster RCNN approach:

1. We take an image as input and pass it to the ConvNet which returns the feature map for
that image.
2. Region proposal network is applied on these feature maps. This returns the object
proposals along with their objectness score.
3. A RoI pooling layer is applied on these proposals to bring down all the proposals to the
same size.
4. Finally, the proposals are passed to a fully connected layer which has a softmax layer
and a linear regression layer at its top, to classify and output the bounding boxes for
objects.

Let me briefly explain how this Region Proposal Network (RPN) actually works.

To begin with, Faster RCNN takes the feature maps from CNN and passes them on to the
Region Proposal Network. RPN uses a sliding window over these feature maps, and at each
window, it generates k Anchor boxes of different shapes and sizes:
Anchor boxes are fixed-sized boundary boxes that are placed throughout the image and
have different shapes and sizes. For each anchor, RPN predicts two things:

 The first is the probability that an anchor is an object (it does not consider which class
the object belongs to)
 Second is the bounding box regressor for adjusting the anchors to better fit the object
We now have bounding boxes of different shapes and sizes which are passed on to the RoI
pooling layer. Now it might be possible that after the RPN step, there are proposals with no
classes assigned to them. We can take each proposal and crop it so that each proposal
contains an object. This is what the RoI pooling layer does. It extracts fixed sized feature
maps for each anchor:
Then these feature maps are passed to a fully connected layer which has a softmax and a
linear regression layer. It finally classifies the object and predicts the bounding boxes for
the identified objects.

4.2 Problems with Faster RCNN

All of the object detection algorithms we have discussed so far use regions to identify the
objects. The network does not look at the complete image in one go, but focuses on parts of
the image sequentially. This creates two complications:

 The algorithm requires many passes through a single image to extract all the objects
 As there are different systems working one after the other, the performance of the
systems further ahead depends on how the previous systems performed