# How To Effectively Train An Ensemble Of Faster R-CNN Object Detectors To Quantify Uncertainty

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.04829 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04829/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (2017)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [Dropout as a Bayesian Approximation: Representing Model Uncertainty in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02142/) (2015)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [YOLO9000: Better, Faster, Stronger](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08242/) (2016)
- [YOLOX: Exceeding YOLO Series in 2021](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08430/) (2021)
- [A Review of Uncertainty Quantification in Deep Learning: Techniques, Applications and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.06225/) (2020)
- [A Survey of Uncertainty in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03342/) (2021)
- [MOT16: A Benchmark for Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.00831/) (2016)
- [Measuring Calibration in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01685/) (2019)
- [Soft-NMS -- Improving Object Detection With One Line of Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04503/) (2017)
- [Verified Uncertainty Calibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.10155/) (2019)
- [Ensemble deep learning: A review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02395/) (2021)
- [Uncertainty Estimates and Multi-Hypotheses Networks for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.07095/) (2018)
- [A Survey of Deep Learning-based Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.09408/) (2019)
- [Gaussian YOLOv3: An Accurate and Fast Object Detector Using Localization Uncertainty for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04620/) (2019)
- [A Survey of Modern Deep Learning based Object Detection Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11892/) (2021)
- [A Review of Object Detection Models based on Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.01614/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents a new approach for training two-stage object detection ensemble models, more specifically, Faster R-CNN models to estimate uncertainty. We propose training one Region Proposal Network(RPN) and multiple Fast R-CNN prediction heads is all you need to build a robust deep ensemble network for estimating uncertainty in object detection. We present this approach and provide experiments to show that this approach is much faster than the naive method of fully training all n models in an ensemble. We also estimate the uncertainty by measuring this ensemble model's Expected Calibration Error (ECE). We then further compare the performance of this model with that of Gaussian YOLOv3, a variant of YOLOv3 that models uncertainty using predicted bounding box coordinates. The source code is released at urlhttps://github.com/Akola-Mbey-Denis/EfficientEnsemble
