# CornerNet-Lite: Efficient Keypoint Based Object Detection

Source: [CornerNet-Lite: Efficient Keypoint Based Object Detection](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa684f1e209131cea1b524>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2025-12-25T03:24:21.798Z

Authors: Hei Law, Yun Teng, Olga Russakovsky, Jia Deng

Published: 2019-04-18T17:21:15.000Z

## Abstract

Keypoint-based methods are a relatively new paradigm in object detection, eliminating the need for anchor boxes and offering a simplified detection framework. Keypoint-based CornerNet achieves state of the art accuracy among single-stage detectors. However, this accuracy comes at high processing cost. In this work, we tackle the problem of efficient keypoint-based object detection and introduce CornerNet-Lite. CornerNet-Lite is a combination of two efficient variants of CornerNet: CornerNet-Saccade, which uses an attention mechanism to eliminate the need for exhaustively processing all pixels of the image, and CornerNet-Squeeze, which introduces a new compact backbone architecture. Together these two variants address the two critical use cases in efficient object detection: improving efficiency without sacrificing accuracy, and improving accuracy at real-time efficiency. CornerNet-Saccade is suitable for offline processing, improving the efficiency of CornerNet by 6.0x and the AP by 1.0% on COCO. CornerNet-Squeeze is suitable for real-time detection, improving both the efficiency and accuracy of the popular real-time detector YOLOv3 (34.4% AP at 30ms for CornerNet-Squeeze compared to 33.0% AP at 39ms for YOLOv3 on COCO). Together these contributions for the first time reveal the potential of keypoint-based detection to be useful for applications requiring processing efficiency.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

- [Object Detection on MS COCO (val)](<https://www.sota2.com/research/sota/object-detection-on-ms-coco-val.md>): Object Detection; MS-COCO (val); mAP: 0.365.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.08900>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.08900.pdf>)