Cited by 543Advanced Neural Network ApplicationsAdvanced Image and Video Retrieval TechniquesVisual Attention and Saliency Detection

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 34 of the 36 references it cites were found in a registry or an index; none of the 27 sources its claims cite is checked for support yet.

Weighted boxes fusion: Ensembling boxes from different object detection models

Open access
Solovyev, Roman, Wang, Weimin, Gabruseva, Tatiana·2021·Image and Vision Computing

Overview

AI snapshot

Written from the paper’s full text.

TL;DR

Weighted Boxes Fusion (WBF) ensembles object detection boxes by fusing all predictions using confidence-weighted coordinates and rescaling confidence by cluster size and model count. It outperformed NMS, soft-NMS, and NMW on COCO and Open Images ensembles, reaching 56.1 mAP on COCO validation and 56.4 mAP on COCO test.

Key findings

  • On a two-model COCO ensemble (EfficientDetB6 + EfficientDetB7), WBF achieved mAP(0.5..0.95) = 0.5344, mAP@0.5 = 0.7244, and mAP@0.75 = 0.5824, compared with NMS 0.5269/0.7156/0.5737, soft-NMS 0.5239/0.7121/0.5677, and NMW 0.5285/0.7171/0.5743.
  • For test-time augmentation with EfficientDetB7, WBF reached mAP(0.5..0.95) = 0.5262, versus NMS 0.5233, soft-NMS 0.5210, and NMW 0.5250.
  • On a many-model COCO ensemble, WBF gave 56.1 mAP on validation and 56.4 mAP on test, described as the top third result on the MS COCO leaderboard as of 07/08/2020.
  • On Open Images, WBF reached 0.5665 mAP@0.5 for a RetinaNet ensemble (vs NMS 0.5442 and soft-NMS 0.5428) and 0.5982 mAP@0.5 for an ensemble of fairly different models (vs NMW 0.5667, NMS 0.5642, soft-NMS 0.5616), helping achieve 7th out of 558 in the challenge.

Methods

  • WBF collects all predicted boxes, sorts them by confidence, clusters boxes with IoU > THR (THR = 0.55 was close to optimal in experiments), fuses coordinates as confidence-weighted sums, sets fused confidence as the average confidence, then rescales confidence by the number of boxes in the cluster divided by the number of models.
  • Evaluation used Open Images V5 (about 16M boxes, 600 classes, 1.9M images; training 1,743,042 images, validation 41,620, test 99,999; mAP@0.5) and MS COCO (over 200,000 images, 80 categories; train2017 118k, val2017 5k, test 20k; mAP over IoU 0.5 to 0.95).
  • Models included RetinaNet, EfficientDet, DetectoRS, YOLOv5, Faster R-CNN, Mask R-CNN, and Cascade R-CNN; WBF was compared against NMS, soft-NMS, and NMW, with grid search for optimal parameters.

Limitations

  • The paper states WBF is slower than NMS and soft-NMS, on average around three times slower than standard NMS.
  • The paper reports that replacing NMS at the output of an individual model with WBF degraded performance: RetinaNet ResNet152 on Open Images gave raw boxes 0.1718 mAP, NMS default 0.4902, NMS optimal 0.4906, and WBF optimal 0.4532; the authors attribute this to excessive low-scored wrong predictions, noting WBF works better for ensembles of fairly accurate models.
  • Evident from the text: WBF performance depends on tuned parameters such as IoU threshold and model weights, which were optimized by grid search in the reported experiments.

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Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1016/j.imavis.2021.104117

Cites

34 of 34 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

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Claims the paper makes

16 Not checked yet · 15 Own result · 8 Own interpretation · 5 No basis given · 3 Own method

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  • It may state two separate claims as one. 13
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29 of 29
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    The 3D version of boxes fusion was successfully applied by the winning teams of Waymo Open Dataset and Lyft 3D Object Detection for Autonomous Vehicles challenges.

    “The 3D version of boxes fusion was successfully applied by the winning teams of Waymo Open Dataset and Lyft 3D Object Detection for Autonomous Vehicles challenges.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    The Open Images dataset is the largest labeled dataset with object detection annotations to date.

    “We used the Open Images data set [20], the largest data set with object detection annotations to date”
    “To date, it is the largest labeled dataset with object detection annotations.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    The test set labels are not available.

    “As the test set labels are not available, we performed the ablation study on the validation set.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Most neural networks for Object Detection use NMS or Soft-NMS output to filter predicted boxes.

    “Most neural networks for Object Detection use NMS or Soft-NMS output to filter predicted boxes.”
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Metadata

Authors
Solovyev, R., Wang, W., & Gabruseva, T.
Affiliations
  • Russian Academy of Sciences (RU)
  • National University of Singapore (SG)
  • Cork University Hospital (IE)
Corresponding author
Solovyev, Roman
Venue
Image and Vision Computing
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Published
2021-03
Volume
107
Pages
104117
ISSN
0262-8856 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W3127743092
Cited by
543
References
36
Citations by year
2026: 108 · 2025: 98 · 2024: 92 · 2023: 130 · 2022: 76 · 2021: 36
FWCI
30.03
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Image and Vision Computing (publishedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Advanced Neural Network Applications
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Advanced Image and Video Retrieval Techniques
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Visual Attention and Saliency Detection
Keywords
object detection, model ensembling, confidence scores, 3D object detection, autonomous driving, Waymo Open Dataset

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