This paper introduces the Budding Ensemble Architecture (BEA), a novel reduced ensemble architecture for anchor-based object detection models. Object detection models are crucial in vision-based tasks, particularly in autonomous systems. They should provide precise bounding box detections while also calibrating their predicted confidence scores, leading to higher-quality uncertainty estimates. However, current models may make erroneous decisions due to false positives receiving high scores or true positives being discarded due to low scores. BEA aims to address these issues. The proposed loss functions in BEA improve the confidence score calibration and lower the uncertainty error, which results in a better distinction of true and false positives and, eventually, higher accuracy of the object detection models. Both Base-YOLOv3 and SSD models were enhanced using the BEA method and its proposed loss functions. The BEA on Base-YOLOv3 trained on the KITTI dataset results in a 6% and 3.7% increase in mAP and AP50, respectively. Utilizing a well-balanced uncertainty estimation threshold to discard samples in real-time even leads to a 9.6% higher AP50 than its base model. This is attributed to a 40% increase in the area under the AP50-based retention curve used to measure the quality of calibration of confidence scores. Furthermore, BEA-YOLOV3 trained on KITTI provides superior out-of-distribution detection on Citypersons, BDD100K, and COCO datasets compared to the ensembles and vanilla models of YOLOv3 and Gaussian-YOLOv3.

翻译：本文介绍了萌芽集成架构（BEA），一种用于基于锚点的目标检测模型的简化集成新架构。目标检测模型在视觉任务中至关重要，尤其是在自主系统中。它们应提供精确的边界框检测，同时校准其预测置信度得分，从而获得更高质量的不确定性估计。然而，当前模型可能因误检获得高分或真检因低分被丢弃而做出错误决策。BEA旨在解决这些问题。BEA中提出的损失函数改善了置信度得分校准并降低了不确定性误差，从而更好地区分真检与误检，最终提升目标检测模型的准确率。使用BEA方法及其提出的损失函数对基础YOLOv3和SSD模型进行了增强。基于KITTI数据集训练的BEA-YOLOv3在mAP和AP50上分别提升了6%和3.7%。利用均衡的不确定性估计阈值实时丢弃样本，其AP50甚至比基础模型高出9.6%。这归因于基于AP50的保留曲线下面积增加了40%，该曲线用于衡量置信度评分校准质量。此外，与YOLOv3及高斯YOLOv3的集成模型和原始模型相比，在KITTI上训练的BEA-YOLOv3在Citypersons、BDD100K和COCO数据集上表现出更优的分布外检测性能。