You Get What You Focus on: A Weighting Factor for IoU-based Regression Loss

Loss functions are essential to bounding box regression which plays a significant role in deep learning based object detection. Despite the effectiveness of the popular Intersection over Union (IoU) based losses, there is still an imbalance problem of high- and low-quality predicted bounding boxes, impeding the accuracy and convergence speed during bound box regression. Specifically, we observe that the huge amount of predicted bounding boxes having small overlapping regions with ground truth box overwhelms the amount of predicted bounding boxes having large overlapping regions. In this paper, we propose a simple weighting factor that is able to reshape the existing IoU-based losses according to a geometric relationship of bounding boxes. In this way, we are able to effectively down-weight the contribution of low-quality predicted boxes and focus training on high-quality ones. Extensive experiments have been carried out on popular IoU-based losses with various object detection techniques. By simply incorporating the proposed weighting factor, we are able to achieve notable performance gains on the popular MS COCO dataset.