  Current object detection approaches predict bounding boxes, but these provide
little instance-specific information beyond location, scale and aspect ratio.
In this work, we propose to directly regress to objects' shapes in addition to
their bounding boxes and categories. It is crucial to find an appropriate shape
representation that is compact and decodable, and in which objects can be
compared for higher-order concepts such as view similarity, pose variation and
occlusion. To achieve this, we use a denoising convolutional auto-encoder to
establish an embedding space, and place the decoder after a fast end-to-end
network trained to regress directly to the encoded shape vectors. This yields
what to the best of our knowledge is the first real-time shape prediction
network, running at ~35 FPS on a high-end desktop. With higher-order shape
reasoning well-integrated into the network pipeline, the network shows the
useful practical quality of generalising to unseen categories similar to the
ones in the training set, something that most existing approaches fail to
handle.
