text: With the advent of deep learning, object detection drifted from a bottom-up to a top-down recognition problem. State of the art algorithms enumerate a near-exhaustive list of object locations and classify each into: object or not. In this paper, we show that bottom-up approaches still perform competitively. We detect four extreme points (top-most, left-most, bottom-most, right-most) and one center point of objects using a standard keypoint estimation network. We group the five keypoints into a bounding box if they are geometrically aligned. Object detection is then a purely appearance-based keypoint estimation problem, without region classification or implicit feature learning. The proposed method performs on-par with the state-of-the-art region based detection methods, with a bounding box AP of 43.2 on COCO test-dev. In addition, our estimated extreme points directly span a coarse octagonal mask, with a COCO Mask AP of 18.9 , much better than the Mask AP of vanilla bounding boxes. Extreme point guided segmentation further improves this to 34.6 Mask AP.
  @cite_49: Semantic keypoints provide concise abstractions for a variety of visual understanding tasks. Existing methods define semantic keypoints separately for each category with a fixed number of semantic labels in fixed indices. As a result, this keypoint representation is in-feasible when objects have a varying number of parts, e.g. chairs with varying number of legs. We propose a category-agnostic keypoint representation, which combines a multi-peak heatmap (StarMap) for all the keypoints and their corresponding features as 3D locations in the canonical viewpoint (CanViewFeature) defined for each instance. Our intuition is that the 3D locations of the keypoints in canonical object views contain rich semantic and compositional information. Using our flexible representation, we demonstrate competitive performance in keypoint detection and localization compared to category-specific state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, we show that when augmented with an additional depth channel (DepthMap) to lift the 2D keypoints to 3D, our representation can achieve state-of-the-art results in viewpoint estimation. Finally, we show that our category-agnostic keypoint representation can be generalized to novel categories.
summary: Prevalent keypoint detection methods work on well-defined semantic keypoints, e.g., human joints. StarMap @cite_49 mixes all types of keypoints using a single heatmap for general keypoint detection. Our extreme and center points are a kind of such general implicit keypoints, but with more explicit geometry property.