Object Proposal Generation Using Two-Stage Cascade SVMs

Object proposal algorithms have shown great promise as a first step for object recognition and detection. Good object proposal generation algorithms require high object detection recall rate as well as low computational cost, because generating object proposals is usually utilized as a preprocessing step. The problem of how to accelerate the object proposal generation and evaluation process without decreasing recall is thus of great interest. In this paper, we propose a new object proposal generation method using two-stage cascade support vector machines (SVMs), where in the first stage linear filters are learned for predefined quantized scales/aspect-ratios independently, and in the second stage a global linear classifier is learned across all the quantized scales/aspect-ratios for calibration, so that all the windows from the first stage can be compared properly. The windows with highest scores from the second stage are kept as inputs to our new efficient proposal calibration algorithm to improve their localization quality significantly, resulting in our final object proposals. We explain our scale/aspect-ratio quantization scheme, and investigate the effects of combinations of ℓ
₁
and ℓ
₂
regularizers in cascade SVMs with/without ranking constraints in learning. Comprehensive experiments on VOC2007 dataset are conducted, and our method is comparable with the current state-of-the-art methods with much better computational efficiency.