Multi-Task Vehicle Detection With Region-of-Interest Voting

Vehicle detection is a challenging problem in autonomous driving systems, due to its large structural and appearance variations. In this paper, we propose a novel vehicle detection scheme based on multi-task deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and region-of-interest (RoI) voting. In the design of CNN architecture, we enrich the supervised information with subcategory, region overlap, bounding-box regression, and category of each training RoI as a multi-task learning framework. This design allows the CNN model to share visual knowledge among different vehicle attributes simultaneously, and thus, detection robustness can be effectively improved. In addition, most existing methods consider each RoI independently, ignoring the clues from its neighboring RoIs. In our approach, we utilize the CNN model to predict the offset direction of each RoI boundary toward the corresponding ground truth. Then, each RoI can vote those suitable adjacent bounding boxes, which are consistent with this additional information. The voting results are combined with the score of each RoI itself to find a more accurate location from a large number of candidates. Experimental results on the real-world computer vision benchmarks KITTI and the PASCAL2007 vehicle data set show that our approach achieves superior performance in vehicle detection compared with other existing published works.