Understanding COCO evaluation "maximum detections"

Question

I started using the cocoapi to evaluate a model trained using the Object Detection API. After reading various sources that explain mean average precision (mAP) and recall, I am confused with the "maximum detections" paramter used in the cocoapi.

From what I understood (e.g. here, here or here), one calculates mAP by calculating precision and recall for various model score thresholds. This gives the precision-recall curve and mAP is calculated as an approximation to the area under this curve. Or, expressed differently, as the average of the maximum precision in defined recall ranges (0:0.1:1).

However, the cocoapi seems to calculate precision and recall for a given number of maximum detections (maxDet) with the highest scores. And from there get the precision-recall curve for maxDets = 1, 10, 100. Why is this a good metric since it is clearly not the same as the above method (it potentially excludes datapoints)?

In my example, I have ~ 3000 objects per image. Evaluating the result using the cocoapi gives terrible recall because it limits the number of detected objects to 100.

For testing purposes, I feed the evaluation dataset as the ground truth and the detected objects (with some artificial scores). I would expect precision and recall pretty good, which is actually happening. But as soon as I feed in more than 100 objects, precision and recall go down with increasing number of "detected objects". Even though they are all "correct"! How does that make sense?

Answer 1

You can change the maxDets parameter and define a new summarize() instance method.

Let's create a COCOeval object:

cocoEval = COCOeval(cocoGt,cocoDt,annType)
cocoEval.params.maxDets = [200]
cocoEval.params.imgIds  = imgIdsDt
cocoEval.evaluate()
cocoEval.accumulate()
cocoEval.summarize_2() # instead of calling cocoEval.summarize()

Now, define summarize_2() method in cocoeval.py module in the following way:

def summarize_2(self):
    # Copy everything from `summarize` method here except
    # the function `_summarizeDets()`.
    def _summarizeDets():
        stats = np.zeros((12,))
        stats[0] = _summarize(1, maxDets=self.params.maxDets[0])
        stats[1] = _summarize(1, iouThr=.5, maxDets=self.params.maxDets[0])
        stats[2] = _summarize(1, iouThr=.75, maxDets=self.params.maxDets[0])
        stats[3] = _summarize(1, areaRng='small', maxDets=self.params.maxDets[0])
        stats[4] = _summarize(1, areaRng='medium', maxDets=self.params.maxDets[0])
        stats[5] = _summarize(1, areaRng='large', maxDets=self.params.maxDets[0])
        stats[6] = _summarize(0, maxDets=self.params.maxDets[0])
        stats[9] = _summarize(0, areaRng='small', maxDets=self.params.maxDets[0])
        stats[10] = _summarize(0, areaRng='medium', maxDets=self.params.maxDets[0])
        stats[11] = _summarize(0, areaRng='large', maxDets=self.params.maxDets[0])
        return stats
    # Copy other things which are left from `summarize()` here.

If you run the above method over your dataset, you will get an output similar to this:

 Average Precision  (AP) @[ IoU=0.50:0.95 | area=   all | maxDets=200 ] = 0.507
 Average Precision  (AP) @[ IoU=0.50      | area=   all | maxDets=200 ] = 0.699
 Average Precision  (AP) @[ IoU=0.75      | area=   all | maxDets=200 ] = 0.575
 Average Precision  (AP) @[ IoU=0.50:0.95 | area= small | maxDets=200 ] = 0.586
 Average Precision  (AP) @[ IoU=0.50:0.95 | area=medium | maxDets=200 ] = 0.519
 Average Precision  (AP) @[ IoU=0.50:0.95 | area= large | maxDets=200 ] = 0.501
 Average Recall     (AR) @[ IoU=0.50:0.95 | area=   all | maxDets=200 ] = 0.598
 Average Recall     (AR) @[ IoU=0.50:0.95 | area= small | maxDets=200 ] = 0.640
 Average Recall     (AR) @[ IoU=0.50:0.95 | area=medium | maxDets=200 ] = 0.566
 Average Recall     (AR) @[ IoU=0.50:0.95 | area= large | maxDets=200 ] = 0.564

Answer 2

I came to the conclusion, that this is just the way that the cocoapi defines its metric. It probably makes sense in their context, but I can as well define my own (which is what I did), based on the articles I read and linked above.