Faster R-CNN is an object detection neural network that improves on R-CNN models by making them faster and training the whole network end-to-end. It introduces a Region Proposal Network that proposes regions of interest within the image in one forward pass of the network using anchors of different scales and aspect ratios. These proposals are then fed into the Fast R-CNN network for classification and bounding box regression in one stage of training instead of multiple stages like R-CNN. Mask R-CNN extends Faster R-CNN by adding a branch to predict segmentation masks for each region of interest in parallel with classification and bounding box regression.