  One of the major challenges in object detection is to propose detectors with
highly accurate localization of objects. The online sampling of high-loss
region proposals (hard examples) uses the multitask loss with equal weight
settings across all loss types (e.g, classification and localization, rigid and
non-rigid categories) and ignores the influence of different loss distributions
throughout the training process, which we find essential to the training
efficacy. In this paper, we present the Stratified Online Hard Example Mining
(S-OHEM) algorithm for training higher efficiency and accuracy detectors.
S-OHEM exploits OHEM with stratified sampling, a widely-adopted sampling
technique, to choose the training examples according to this influence during
hard example mining, and thus enhance the performance of object detectors. We
show through systematic experiments that S-OHEM yields an average precision
(AP) improvement of 0.5% on rigid categories of PASCAL VOC 2007 for both the
IoU threshold of 0.6 and 0.7. For KITTI 2012, both results of the same metric
are 1.6%. Regarding the mean average precision (mAP), a relative increase of
0.3% and 0.5% (1% and 0.5%) is observed for VOC07 (KITTI12) using the same set
of IoU threshold. Also, S-OHEM is easy to integrate with existing region-based
detectors and is capable of acting with post-recognition level regressors.
