Toward an Ensemble of Object Detectors

The field of object detection has witnessed great strides in recent years. With the wave of deep neural networks (DNN), many breakthroughs have achieved for the problems of object detection which previously were thought to be difficult. However, there exists a limitation with DNN-based approaches as some architectures are only suitable for particular types of object. Thus it would be desirable to combine the strengths of different methods to handle objects in different contexts. In this study, we propose an ensemble of object detectors in which individual detectors are adaptively combine for the collaborated decision. The combination is conducted on the outputs of detectors including the predicted label and location for each object. We proposed a detector selection method to select the suitable detectors and a weighted-based combining method to combine the predicted locations of selected detectors. The parameters of these methods are optimized by using Particle Swarm Optimization in order to maximize mean Average Precision (mAP) metric. Experiments conducted on VOC2007 dataset with six object detectors show that our ensemble method is better than each single detector.