Detection Proposals

Evaluation of detection proposal algorithms. The code belongs to the BMVC paper How good are detection proposals, really? and an the PAMI paper What makes for effective detection proposals?. Have a look at the Project Page for more information.

Please contact me if you're having trouble with the code!

Plot evaluation curves

1. Get the data that you want to use from the Project Page.
2. Edit get_config.m to point to the right locations for images, candidates and so on.
3. Make sure you either start matlab in the root directory of the code or run startup.m manually once.
4. Run plot_recall_voc07.m, curves will be in the figures subdirectory.

Benchmark your own method

1. Follow Plot evaluation curves.
2. Write a wrapper function that takes an image and the number of proposal boxes and returns the proposals and scores. Proposals are a nx4 matrix, where n is the number of proposals and every row has the format [x1 y1 x2 y2] (x and y are 1-based image coordinates). See method_wrappers/ for examples.
3. Add your method to shared/get_method_configs.m
4. Run compute_recall_candidates_voc07.m passing only the config of your method as an argument. If your method is slow, you probably want to parallelize it in a cluster.
5. Run plot_recall_voc07.m, curves will be in the figures subdirectory.

You don't have to use compute_recall_candidates_voc07.m, but you can have a look to get an idea about how to save the candidates in the right format so, plot_recall_voc07.m will be able to read it.

Format of the precomputed proposals

For the recall experiments, there is one mat file per image, each storing the proposals for that image. There are two cases of how proposals are stored. In the easiest case the proposals can be filtered after we have generated enough of them, for example because they are sorted or scored. If this is not the case we need to rerun the proposal method for different number of proposals that we would like to evaluate.

In both cases the each mat file contains the variables boxes, scores, and num_candidates.

Proposals can be filtered

boxes is a n-by-4 matrix in which each row is of the format [x1 y1 x2 y2] (x and y are 1-based image coordinates).

scores is a column vector of length n, containing scores for each of the proposals in boxes. How these scores are to be used to find the top k proposals is specified per method in shared/get_method_configs.m. scores can also be empty, then the only valid choice for ordering is none (proposals are already sorted) or random (proposals should be shuffled before using the first k).

num_candidates should be empty or n.

Proposals cannot be filtered

In this case the proposal method will be called several times with different num_candidates parameter, so we can make a plot for varying number of proposals. Let's say we run the proposal method d=4 times with the num_candidates = 10, 100, 1000, 10000. These parameters are saved as a column vector in the num_candidates variable in the mat file.

boxes and scores are now cells with d elements. Each element of the cells are as described above (for proposals that can be filtered) and contain proposals and scores for each of the d reruns of the proposal method.

Implementation

If you want more details you can have a look at the files compute_recall_candidates_voc07.m around lines 39-65 and at the functions that are called there (read_candidates_mat, save_candidates_mat).