Reinforcedet: Object Detection By Integrating Reinforcement Learning With Decoupled Pipeline

Recent object detection methods largely rely on numerous pre-defined anchors that suffer from huge computational cost and resource consumption. To solve this issue, we propose a low-memory deep reinforcement learning based anchor-free object detection approach, namely ReinforceDet, which computes few but accurate region proposals for detection. Specifically, the extracted feature maps are fed into a reinforcement learning network to localize objects as initial region proposals with our re-designed reward function and then adopt another neural network to refine them. To speed up this process in test phase, we decouple the two-branch CNN networks as light-head cascaded subnetworks, named IoU-net and bounding box net. Experimental results show that ReinforceDet could obtain the state-of-the-art performance with much lower compitational and memory cost.