ssd_keras

Why we included this project

This Keras port of the Single Shot MultiBox Detector was built around a clear goal: making the architecture readable instead of a black box. The project's stated purpose is a low-level understanding of the model, which is why it ships detailed code comments and tutorials alongside the SSD300 and SSD512 designs, plus a compact SSD7 variant you can train from scratch on a mid-tier GPU for simpler detection tasks. Ported weights from the original Caffe implementation reproduce the same mAP values, so models you train here should match the canonical version. The fine-tuning notebook helps subsample trained weights for custom datasets, and the base-network templates let you swap in your own architecture. Keep in mind the code targets the older Keras API and has not been maintained in years, so it is best treated as a well-documented reference for research and coursework rather than a base for a production stack.