Object Detection: An End to End Theoretical Perspective

We all know about the image classification problem. Given an image can you find out the class the image belongs to? We can solve any new image classification problem with ConvNets and Transfer Learning using pre-trained nets.

ConvNet as fixed feature extractor. Take a ConvNet pretrained on ImageNet, remove the last fully-connected layer (this layer's outputs are the 1000 class scores for a different task like ImageNet), then treat the rest of the ConvNet as a fixed feature extractor for the new dataset. In an AlexNet, this would compute a 4096-D vector for every image that contains the activations of the hidden layer immediately before the classifier. We call these features CNN codes. It is important for performance that these codes are ReLUd (i.e. thresholded at zero) if they were also thresholded during the training of the ConvNet on ImageNet (as is usually the case). Once you extract the 4096-D codes for all images, train a linear classifier (e.g. Linear SVM or Softmax classifier) f…