The concept of NMS might sound simple. From a set of overlapping solutions, just pick the best one! However, the implementation is more complex than you might initially think. Remember the image pyramid? Overlapping detections can occur at different scales. We must gather up all our positive detections, and convert their bounds back to a common scale before we check for overlap. A typical implementation of NMS takes the following approach:
- Construct an image pyramid.
- Scan each level of the pyramid with the sliding window approach, for object detection. For each window that yields a positive detection (beyond a certain arbitrary confidence threshold), convert the window back to the original image's scale. Add the window and its confidence score to a list of positive detections.
- Sort the list of positive detections by order of descending confidence score...
