In this paper, we introduce an innovative method to improve the convergence speed and accuracy of object detection neural networks. Our approach, CONVERGE-FAST-AUXNET, is based on employing multiple, dependent loss metrics and weighting them optimally using an on-line trained auxiliary network. Experiments are performed in the well-known RoboCup@Work challenge environment. A fully convolutional segmentation network is trained on detecting objects' pickup points. We empirically obtain an approximate measure for the rate of success of a robotic pickup operation based on the accuracy of the object detection network. Our experiments show that adding an optimally weighted Euclidean distance loss to a network trained on the commonly used Intersection over Union (IoU) metric reduces the convergence time by 42.48%. The estimated pickup rate is improved by 39.90%. Compared to state-of-the-art task weighting methods, the improvement is 24.5% in convergence, and 15.8% on the estimated pickup rate.
@article{arxiv.1808.04480,
title = {Fast Convergence for Object Detection by Learning how to Combine Error Functions},
author = {Benjamin Schnieders and Karl Tuyls},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1808.04480},
year = {2018}
}