Papers › SNIPER: Efficient Multi-Scale Training

SNIPER: Efficient Multi-Scale Training

23 May 2018NeurIPS 2018 12arXiv:1805.09300archive 2025-07-28

Bharat Singh, Mahyar Najibi, Larry S. Davis

We present SNIPER, an algorithm for performing efficient multi-scale training in instance level visual recognition tasks. Instead of processing every pixel in an image pyramid, SNIPER processes context regions around ground-truth instances (referred to as chips) at the appropriate scale. For background sampling, these context-regions are generated using proposals extracted from a region proposal network trained with a short learning schedule. Hence, the number of chips generated per image during training adaptively changes based on the scene complexity. SNIPER only processes 30% more pixels compared to the commonly used single scale training at 800x1333 pixels on the COCO dataset. But, it also observes samples from extreme resolutions of the image pyramid, like 1400x2000 pixels. As SNIPER operates on resampled low resolution chips (512x512 pixels), it can have a batch size as large as 20 on a single GPU even with a ResNet-101 backbone. Therefore it can benefit from batch-normalization during training without the need for synchronizing batch-normalization statistics across GPUs. SNIPER brings training of instance level recognition tasks like object detection closer to the protocol for image classification and suggests that the commonly accepted guideline that it is important to train on high resolution images for instance level visual recognition tasks might not be correct. Our implementation based on Faster-RCNN with a ResNet-101 backbone obtains an mAP of 47.6% on the COCO dataset for bounding box detection and can process 5 images per second during inference with a single GPU. Code is available at https://github.com/MahyarNajibi/SNIPER/.

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Code

MahyarNajibi/SNIPER officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubmxnetNOASSERTION report
Hwang64/PSIS mentioned on GitHub report
starimpact/arm_SNIPER mentioned on GitHubtfNOASSERTION report

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Tasks

Object DetectionRegion Proposalimage-classificationobject-detection

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Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Object Detection COCO test-dev SNIPER (ResNet-101) AP50 67.0 #129 of 225 Archive leaderboard report
Object Detection COCO test-dev SNIPER (ResNet-101) AP75 51.6 #129 of 225 Archive leaderboard report
Object Detection COCO test-dev SNIPER (ResNet-101) APL 58.1 #129 of 225 Archive leaderboard report
Object Detection COCO test-dev SNIPER (ResNet-101) APM 48.9 #129 of 225 Archive leaderboard report
Object Detection COCO test-dev SNIPER (ResNet-101) APS 29.6 #129 of 225 Archive leaderboard report
Object Detection COCO test-dev SNIPER (ResNet-101) Hardware Burden 29G #129 of 225 Archive leaderboard report
Object Detection COCO test-dev SNIPER (ResNet-101) box mAP 46.1 #129 of 225 Archive leaderboard report
Object Detection COCO test-dev SNIPER (ResNet-50) AP50 65.0 #157 of 225 Archive leaderboard report
Object Detection COCO test-dev SNIPER (ResNet-50) AP75 48.6 #157 of 225 Archive leaderboard report
Object Detection COCO test-dev SNIPER (ResNet-50) APL 56.0 #157 of 225 Archive leaderboard report
Object Detection COCO test-dev SNIPER (ResNet-50) APM 46.3 #157 of 225 Archive leaderboard report
Object Detection COCO test-dev SNIPER (ResNet-50) APS 26.1 #157 of 225 Archive leaderboard report
Object Detection COCO test-dev SNIPER (ResNet-50) Hardware Burden 29G #157 of 225 Archive leaderboard report
Object Detection COCO test-dev SNIPER (ResNet-50) box mAP 43.5 #157 of 225 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

Introduced by this paper: SNIPER

1x1 ConvolutionAverage PoolingBatch NormalizationBottleneck Residual BlockConvolutionFaster R-CNNGlobal Average PoolingKaiming InitializationMax PoolingRPNReLUResidual BlockResidual ConnectionRoIPoolSNIPERSoftmaxWeight Decay

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