SIoU Loss: More Powerful Learning for Bounding Box Regression
This work addresses a bottleneck in object detection for computer vision applications, offering an incremental improvement over existing loss functions.
The paper tackles the problem of slower convergence and lower accuracy in object detection by proposing a new loss function, SIoU, which incorporates the direction of mismatch between predicted and ground truth bounding boxes, resulting in improved training speed and inference accuracy.
The effectiveness of Object Detection, one of the central problems in computer vision tasks, highly depends on the definition of the loss function - a measure of how accurately your ML model can predict the expected outcome. Conventional object detection loss functions depend on aggregation of metrics of bounding box regression such as the distance, overlap area and aspect ratio of the predicted and ground truth boxes (i.e. GIoU, CIoU, ICIoU etc). However, none of the methods proposed and used to date considers the direction of the mismatch between the desired ground box and the predicted, "experimental" box. This shortage results in slower and less effective convergence as the predicted box can "wander around" during the training process and eventually end up producing a worse model. In this paper a new loss function SIoU was suggested, where penalty metrics were redefined considering the angle of the vector between the desired regression. Applied to conventional Neural Networks and datasets it is shown that SIoU improves both the speed of training and the accuracy of the inference. The effectiveness of the proposed loss function was revealed in a number of simulations and tests.