Hei Law will present his Pre FPO "Learning to Detect Objects by Grouping" on Friday, February 4, 2022 at 2:30pm via Zoom. Zoom link: https://princeton.zoom.us/j/6764372799?pwd=a3U4ZmZBZXdTbWhqOFBHbmN1c2pEUT09 Committee: Prof. Jia Deng (examiner), Prof. Adam Finkelstein (examiner), Prof. Felix Heide (examiner), Prof. Szymon Rusinkiewicz (reader) and Prof. Olga Russakovsky (reader) Abstract: Object detection is a fundamental task in computer vision and a part of many computer vision algorithms. In this talk, we will present our work on developing more accurate and efficient object detectors. We will first present two novel corner-based object detectors: CornerNet and CornerNet-Lite. CornerNet reformulates object detection as detecting pairs of corners, which simplifies the design of modern object detectors, and achieves state-of-the-art results. Following up on CornerNet, we introduce CornerNet-Lite where we explore two ways to improve CornerNet’s efficiency. The first way uses a new attention mechanism to process fewer pixels and achieve better performance, while the second one uses a new compact backbone network to achieve real-time performance. Beside the two new detectors, we also present our ongoing work on designing a new pretext task for object detectors to learn useful visual representations. Inspired by the human vision system, we leverage motion information in videos to determine which pixels are likely to belong to the same objects, and train a network to group pixels by objects before fine-tuning it on the detection task. Everyone is welcome to attend.