Patent 9424493 was granted and assigned to Microsoft on August, 2016 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Neural networks for object detection in images are used with a spatial pyramid pooling (SPP) layer. Using the SPP network structure, a fixed-length representation is generated regardless of image size and scale. The feature maps are computed from the entire image once, and the features are pooled in arbitrary regions (sub-images) to generate fixed-length representations for training the detectors. Thus, repeated computation of the convolutional features is avoided while accuracy is enhanced.