mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

FreeAnchor: Learning to Match Anchors for Visual Object Detection

arXiv 1909.02466 ↗First posted 5 Sep 2019cs.CV cs.LGcited by 90

Not on the map. Why?

Abstract (arXiv)

Modern CNN-based object detectors assign anchors for ground-truth objects under the restriction of object-anchor Intersection-over-Unit (IoU). In this study, we propose a learning-to-match approach to break IoU restriction, allowing objects to match anchors in a flexible manner. Our approach, referred to as FreeAnchor, updates hand-crafted anchor assignment to "free" anchor matching by formulating detector training as a maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) procedure. FreeAnchor targets at learning features which best explain a class of objects in terms of both classification and localization. FreeAnchor is implemented by optimizing detection customized likelihood and can be fused with CNN-based detectors in a plug-and-play manner. Experiments on COCO demonstrate that FreeAnchor consistently outperforms their counterparts with significant margins.

Key facts. Cited by 90 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 5 Sep 2019.

Builds on

No reference list yet.

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2021: 26; 2022: 20; 2023: 24; 2024: 11; 2025: 6; 2026: 3.

90 papers.

Sort:

By area:

  1. 2021YOLOX: Exceeding YOLO Series in 2021cited by 1,064
  2. 2021TOOD: Task-aligned One-stage Object Detectioncited by 218
  3. 2022M2BEV: Multi-Camera Joint 3D Detection and Segmentation with Unified Birds-Eye View Representationcited by 155
  4. 2021Probabilistic two-stage detectioncited by 130
  5. 2021Efficient DETR: Improving End-to-End Object Detector with Dense Priorcited by 128
  6. 2022Delving into the Devils of Bird's-eye-view Perception: A Review, Evaluation and Recipecited by 122
  7. 2022Towards Large-Scale Small Object Detection: Survey and Benchmarkscited by 119
  8. 2021You Only Look One-level Featurecited by 116
  9. 2021Oriented RepPoints for Aerial Object Detectioncited by 102
  10. 2021Semantic Relation Reasoning for Shot-Stable Few-Shot Object Detectioncited by 79
  11. 2021Multiple instance active learning for object detectioncited by 77
  12. 2023Dense Distinct Query for End-to-End Object Detectioncited by 76
38 more
  1. 2024SARDet-100K: Towards Open-Source Benchmark and ToolKit for Large-Scale SAR Object Detectioncited by 47
  2. 2022Consistent-Teacher: Towards Reducing Inconsistent Pseudo-targets in Semi-supervised Object Detectioncited by 43
  3. 2023Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation with Decoupled One-Pass Networkcited by 40
  4. 2022Towards Data-Efficient Detection Transformerscited by 34
  5. 2023COCO-O: A Benchmark for Object Detectors under Natural Distribution Shiftscited by 34
  6. 2021Dual-stream Network for Visual Recognitioncited by 33
  7. 2021A Dataset And Benchmark Of Underwater Object Detection For Robot Pickingcited by 31
  8. 2021Mask is All You Need: Rethinking Mask R-CNN for Dense and Arbitrary-Shaped Scene Text Detectioncited by 23
  9. 2022RaLiBEV: Radar and LiDAR BEV Fusion Learning for Anchor Box Free Object Detection Systemscited by 23
  10. 2021Semantic-guided Pixel Sampling for Cloth-Changing Person Re-identificationcited by 22
  11. 2023Object Detection with Transformers: A Reviewcited by 22
  12. 2022Robust Object Detection With Inaccurate Bounding Boxescited by 20
  13. 2021Objects in Semantic Topologycited by 18
  14. 2021Context-Aware Transfer Attacks for Object Detectioncited by 18
  15. 2022GiraffeDet: A Heavy-Neck Paradigm for Object Detectioncited by 17
  16. 2023Ensemble-based Blackbox Attacks on Dense Predictioncited by 16
  17. 2022Prediction-Guided Distillation for Dense Object Detectioncited by 14
  18. 2022A Guide to Image and Video based Small Object Detection using Deep Learning : Case Study of Maritime Surveillancecited by 14
  19. 2022Blackbox Attacks via Surrogate Ensemble Searchcited by 13
  20. 2023MixTeacher: Mining Promising Labels with Mixed Scale Teacher for Semi-Supervised Object Detectioncited by 13
  21. 2021SCPM-Net: An Anchor-free 3D Lung Nodule Detection Network using Sphere Representation and Center Points Matchingcited by 12
  22. 2022ObjectBox: From Centers to Boxes for Anchor-Free Object Detectioncited by 12
  23. 2022CenterNet++ for Object Detectioncited by 9
  24. 2023Spatial Self-Distillation for Object Detection with Inaccurate Bounding Boxescited by 9
  25. 2023UniHead: Unifying Multi-Perception for Detection Headscited by 9
  26. 2021Location-Sensitive Visual Recognition with Cross-IOU Losscited by 8
  27. 2021Know Your Surroundings: Panoramic Multi-Object Tracking by Multimodality Collaborationcited by 8
  28. 2023CBA: Contextual Background Attack against Optical Aerial Detection in the Physical Worldcited by 7
  29. 2021Convolutional Neural Networks with Gated Recurrent Connectionscited by 6
  30. 2022Dynamic Label Assignment for Object Detection by Combining Predicted IoUs and Anchor IoUscited by 6
  31. 2024SpecDETR: A transformer-based hyperspectral point object detection networkcited by 6
  32. 2021PDNet: Toward Better One-Stage Object Detection With Prediction Decouplingcited by 5
  33. 2021Operationalizing Convolutional Neural Network Architectures for Prohibited Object Detection in X-Ray Imagerycited by 5
  34. 2022Task-Balanced Distillation for Object Detectioncited by 5
  35. 2023Align-DETR: Enhancing End-to-end Object Detection with Aligned Losscited by 5
  36. 2023A Comprehensive Study on the Robustness of Image Classification and Object Detection in Remote Sensing: Surveying and Benchmarkingcited by 5
  37. 2023Learning Heavily-Degraded Prior for Underwater Object Detectioncited by 5
  38. 2024ALSS-YOLO: An Adaptive Lightweight Channel Split and Shuffling Network for TIR Wildlife Detection in UAV Imagerycited by 5

50 most cited of 90 All 90 (JSON)