Bag of Freebies for Training Object Detection Neural Networks

Comparing with enormous research achievements targeting better image classification models, efforts applied to object detector training are dwarfed in terms of popularity and universality. Due to significantly more complex network structures and optimization targets, various training strategies and pipelines are specifically designed for certain detection algorithms and no other. In this work, we explore universal tweaks that help boosting the performance of state-of-the-art object detection models to a new level without sacrificing inference speed. Our experiments indicate that these freebies can be as much as 5% absolute precision increase that everyone should consider applying to object detection training to a certain degree.