I am training a single object detector with mask rcnn and I have tried several methods for reducing false positives. I started with a few thousand examples of images of the object with bounding boxes and trained that, got decent results, but when running on images that don't contain that object, would often get false matches with high confidence (sometimes .99).
The first thing I tried was adding the hard example miner in the config file. I believe I did this correctly because I added a print statement to ensure the object gets created. However none of the configs for faster rcnn have hard example mining in them. So I am suspicious that the miner only works correctly for ssd. I would expect a noticeable improvement with a hard example miner but I did not see it
The second thing I tried was to add "background" images. I set the minimum number of negatives to a non-zero value in the hard example miner config and added tons of background images that previously got false detections as part of the training. I even added these images into the tfrecords file so that it would be balanced evenly with images that do have the object. This approach actually made things worse - and gave me more false detections
The last thing I tried was creating another category, called "object-background" and took all the false matches and assigned them to this new category. This approach worked pretty well, but I view it as a hack.
I guess to summarize my main question is - what is the best method for reducing false positives within the current tensorflow object detection framework? Would SSD be a better approach since that seems to have a hard example miner built into it by default in the configs?
thanks