Detect2Rank: Combining Object Detectors Using Learning to Rank

Object detection is an important research area in the field of computer vision. Many detection algorithms have been proposed. However, each object detector relies on specific assumptions of the object appearance and imaging conditions. As a consequence, no algorithm can be considered universal. With the large variety of object detectors, the subsequent question is how to select and combine them. In this paper, we propose a framework to learn how to combine object detectors. The proposed method uses (single) detectors like Deformable Part Models, Color Names and Ensemble of Exemplar-SVMs, and exploits their correlation by high-level contextual features to yield a combined detection list. Experiments on the PASCAL VOC07 and VOC10 data sets show that the proposed method significantly outperforms single object detectors, DPM (8.4%), CN (6.8%) and EES (17.0%) on VOC07 and DPM (6.5%), CN (5.5%) and EES (16.2%) on VOC10. We show with an experiment that there are no constraints on the type of the detector. The proposed method outperforms (2.4%) the state-of-the-art object detector (RCNN) on VOC07 when Regions with Convolutional Neural Network is combined with other detectors used in this paper.