I'm training a model to detect meteors within a picture of the night sky and I have a fairly small dataset with about 85 images and each image is annotated with a bounding box. I'm using the transfer learning technique starting with the ssd_mobilenet_v1_coco_11_06_2017 checkpoint and Tensorflow 1.4. I'm resizing images to 600x600pixels during training. I'm using data augmentation in the pipeline configuration to randomly flip the images horizontally, vertically and rotate 90 deg. After 5000 steps, the model converges to a loss of about 0.3 and will detect meteors but it seems to matter where in the image the meteor is located. Do I have to train the model by giving examples of every possible location? I've attached a sample of a detection run where I tiled a meteor over the entire image and received various levels of detection (filtered to 50%). How can I improve this?detected meteors in image example
1 Answers
It could very well be your data and I think you are making a prudent move by improving the heterogeneity of your dataset, BUT it could also be your choice of model.
It is worth noting that ssd_mobilenet_v1_coco has the lowest COCO mAP relative to the other models in the TensorFlow Object Detection API model zoo. You aren't trying to detect a COCO object, but the mAP numbers are a reasonable aproximation for generic model accuracy.
At the highest possible level, the choice of model is largely a tradeoff between speed/accuracy. The model you chose, ssd_mobilenet_v1_coco, favors speed over accuracy. Consequently, I would reccomend you try one of the Faster RCNN models (e.g., faster_rcnn_inception_v2_coco) before you spend a signifigant amount of time preprocessing images.
