A web-service for object detection using hierarchical models

This paper proposes an architecture for an object detection system suitable for a web-service running distributed on a cluster of machines. We build on top of a recently proposed architecture for distributed visual recognition system and extend it with the object detection algorithm. As sliding-window techniques are computationally unsuitable for web-services we rely on models based on state-of-the-art hierarchical compositions for the object detection algorithm. We provide implementation details for running hierarchical models on top of a distributed platform and propose an additional hypothesis verification step to reduce many false-positives that are common in hierarchical models. For a verification we rely on a state-of-the-art descriptor extracted from the hierarchical structure and use a support vector machine for object classification. We evaluate the system on a cluster of 80 workers and show a response time of around 10 seconds at throughput of around 60 requests per minute.