In this chapter, the problem of object detection was introduced and some basic solutions were proposed. We first focused on the data required and used TensorFlow datasets to get the PASCAL VOC 2007 dataset ready to use in a few lines of code. Then, the problem of using a neural network to regress the coordinate of a bounding box was looked at, showing how a convolutional neural network can be easily used to produce the four coordinates of a bounding box, starting from the image representation. In this way, we build a region proposal, that is, a network able to suggest where in the input image a single object can be detected, without producing other information about the detected object.

After that, the concept of multi-task learning was introduced and how to add a classification head next to the regression head was shown by using the Keras functional API. Then, we covered...