Hei Law will present his General Exam, "CornerNet-Lite: Efficient Keypoint Based Object Detection" on Monday, January 20, 2020 at 3:30pm in CS 401. The members of his committee are as follows: Jia Deng (adviser), Adam Finkelstein, and Olga Russakovsky. Everyone is invited to attend his talk, and those faculty wishing to remain for the oral exam following are welcome to do so. His abstract and reading list follow below. Abstract: We propose CornerNet, a new approach to object detection where we detect an object bounding box as a pair of keypoints, the top-left corner and the bottom-right corner, using a single convolution neural network. By detecting objects as paired keypoints, we eliminate the need for designing a set of anchor boxes commonly used in prior single-stage detectors. In addition to our novel formulation, we introduce corner pooling, a new type of pooling layer that helps the network better localize corners. Experiments show that CornerNet achieves a 42.2% AP on COCO. However, this accuracy comes at high processing cost. We also tackle the problem of efficient keypoint-based object detection and introduce CornerNet-Lite. CornerNet-Lite is a combination of two efficient variants of CornerNet: CornerNet-Saccade, which uses an attention mechanism to eliminate the need for exhaustively processing all pixels of the image, and CornerNet-Squeeze, which introduces a new compact backbone architecture. Together these two variants address the two critical use cases in efficient object detection: improving efficiency without sacrificing accuracy, and improving accuracy at real-time efficiency. CornerNet-Saccade is suitable for offline processing, improving the efficiency of CornerNet by 6.0x and the AP by 1.0% on COCO. CornerNet-Squeeze is suitable for real-time detection, improving both the efficiency and accuracy of the popular real-time detector YOLOv3 (34.4% AP at 34ms for CornerNet-Squeeze compared to 33.0% AP at 39ms for YOLOv3 on COCO). Together these contributions for the first time reveal the potential of keypoint-based detection to be useful for applications requiring processing efficiency Reading List: 1. Szeliski, R. (2010). Computer vision: algorithms and applications. Springer Science & Business Media. 2. Girshick, R., Donahue, J., Darrell, T., & Malik, J. (2014). Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation. In Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition (pp. 580-587). 3. Girshick, R. (2015). Fast r-cnn. In Proceedings of the IEEE international conference on computer vision (pp. 1440-1448). 4. Ren, S., He, K., Girshick, R., & Sun, J. (2015). Faster r-cnn: Towards real-time object detection with region proposal networks. In Advances in neural information processing systems (pp. 91-99). 5. Redmon, J., Divvala, S., Girshick, R., & Farhadi, A. (2016). You only look once: Unified, real-time object detection. In Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition (pp. 779-788). 6. Redmon, J., & Farhadi, A. (2017). YOLO9000: better, faster, stronger. In Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition (pp. 7263-7271). 7. Liu, W., Anguelov, D., Erhan, D., Szegedy, C., Reed, S., Fu, C. Y., & Berg, A. C. (2016, October). Ssd: Single shot multibox detector. In European conference on computer vision (pp. 21-37). Springer, Cham. 8. Lin, T. Y., Goyal, P., Girshick, R., He, K., & Dollár, P. (2017). Focal loss for dense object detection. In Proceedings of the IEEE international conference on computer vision (pp. 2980-2988). 9. Tychsen-Smith, L., & Petersson, L. (2017). Denet: Scalable real-time object detection with directed sparse sampling. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (pp. 428-436). 10. Newell, A., Yang, K., & Deng, J. (2016, October). Stacked hourglass networks for human pose estimation. In European conference on computer vision (pp. 483-499). Springer, Cham. 11. Newell, A., Huang, Z., & Deng, J. (2017). Associative embedding: End-to-end learning for joint detection and grouping. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (pp. 2277-2287).