Ranking-based Adaptive Query Generation for DETRs in Crowded Pedestrian Detection

DEtection TRansformer (DETR) and its variants (DETRs) have been successfully applied to crowded pedestrian detection, which achieved promising performance. However, we find that, in different degrees of crowded scenes, the number of DETRs' queries must be adjusted manually, otherwise, the performance would degrade to varying degrees. In this paper, we first analyze the two current query generation methods and summarize four guidelines for designing the adaptive query generation method. Then, we propose Rank-based Adaptive Query Generation (RAQG) to alleviate the problem. Specifically, we design a rank prediction head that can predict the rank of the lowest confidence positive training sample produced by the encoder. Based on the predicted rank, we design an adaptive selection method that can adaptively select coarse detection results produced by the encoder to generate queries. Moreover, to train the rank prediction head better, we propose Soft Gradient L1 Loss. The gradient of Soft Gradient L1 Loss is continuous, which can describe the relationship between the loss value and the updated value of model parameters granularly. Our method is simple and effective, which can be plugged into any DETRs to make it query-adaptive in theory. The experimental results on Crowdhuman dataset and Citypersons dataset show that our method can adaptively generate queries for DETRs and achieve competitive results. Especially, our method achieves state-of-the-art 39.4% MR on Crowdhuman dataset.