Object detection performance, as measured on the canonical PASCAL VOC dataset, has plateaued in the last few years. The best-performing methods are complex ensemble systems that typically combine multiple low-level image features with high-level context. In this paper, we propose a simple and scalable detection algorithm that improves mean average precision (mAP) by more than 30% relative to the previous best result on VOC 2012---achieving a mAP of 53.3%. Our approach combines two key insights: (1) one can apply high-capacity convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to bottom-up region proposals in order to localize and segment objects and (2) when labeled training data is scarce, supervised pre-training for an auxiliary task, followed by domain-specific fine-tuning, yields a significant performance boost. Since we combine region proposals with CNNs, we call our method R-CNN: Regions with CNN features. We also compare R-CNN to OverFeat, a recently proposed sliding-window detector based on a similar CNN architecture. We find that R-CNN outperforms OverFeat by a large margin on the 200-class ILSVRC2013 detection dataset. Source code for the complete system is available at http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~rbg/rcnn.
We evaluate whether features extracted from the activation of a deep convolutional network trained in a fully supervised fashion on a large, fixed set of object recognition tasks can be re-purposed to novel generic tasks. Our generic tasks may differ significantly from the originally trained tasks and there may be insufficient labeled or unlabeled data to conventionally train or adapt a deep architecture to the new tasks. We investigate and visualize the semantic clustering of deep convolutional features with respect to a variety of such tasks, including scene recognition, domain adaptation, and fine-grained recognition challenges. We compare the efficacy of relying on various network levels to define a fixed feature, and report novel results that significantly outperform the state-of-the-art on several important vision challenges. We are releasing DeCAF, an open-source implementation of these deep convolutional activation features, along with all associated network parameters to enable vision researchers to be able to conduct experimentation with deep representations across a range of visual concept learning paradigms.