Papers › Repulsion Loss: Detecting Pedestrians in a Crowd

Repulsion Loss: Detecting Pedestrians in a Crowd

21 Nov 2017CVPR 2018 6arXiv:1711.07752archive 2025-07-28

Xinlong Wang, Tete Xiao, Yuning Jiang, Shuai Shao, Jian Sun, Chunhua Shen

Detecting individual pedestrians in a crowd remains a challenging problem since the pedestrians often gather together and occlude each other in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we first explore how a state-of-the-art pedestrian detector is harmed by crowd occlusion via experimentation, providing insights into the crowd occlusion problem. Then, we propose a novel bounding box regression loss specifically designed for crowd scenes, termed repulsion loss. This loss is driven by two motivations: the attraction by target, and the repulsion by other surrounding objects. The repulsion term prevents the proposal from shifting to surrounding objects thus leading to more crowd-robust localization. Our detector trained by repulsion loss outperforms all the state-of-the-art methods with a significant improvement in occlusion cases.

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Code

bailvwangzi/repulsion_loss_ssd mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
justinkay/repulsion-loss-detectron2 mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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Tasks

Pedestrian Detectionregression

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Pedestrian Detection Caltech RepLoss + CityPersons dataset Reasonable Miss Rate 4.0 #9 of 33 Archive leaderboard report
Pedestrian Detection Caltech RepLoss Reasonable Miss Rate 5.0 #13 of 33 Archive leaderboard report
Pedestrian Detection CityPersons RepLoss Bare MR^-2 7.6 #17 of 22 Archive leaderboard report
Pedestrian Detection CityPersons RepLoss Heavy MR^-2 56.9 #17 of 22 Archive leaderboard report
Pedestrian Detection CityPersons RepLoss Partial MR^-2 16.8 #17 of 22 Archive leaderboard report
Pedestrian Detection CityPersons RepLoss Reasonable MR^-2 13.2 #17 of 22 Archive leaderboard report

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