MetaAnchor: Learning to Detect Objects with Customized Anchors

We propose a novel and flexible anchor mechanism named MetaAnchor for object detection frameworks. Unlike many previous detectors model anchors via a predefined manner,in MetaAnchor anchor functions could be dynamically generated from the arbitrary customized prior boxes. Taking advantage of weight prediction, MetaAnchor is able to work with most of the anchor-based object detection systems such as RetinaNet. Compared with the predefined anchor scheme, we empirically find that MetaAnchor is more robust to anchor settings and bounding box distributions; inaddition, it also shows the potential on transfer tasks. Our experiment on COCO detection task shows that MetaAnchor consistently outperforms the counterparts in various scenarios.