Average precision (AP) is a widely used metric to evaluate detection accuracy of image and video object detectors. In this paper, we analyze object detection from videos and point out that AP alone is not sufficient to capture the temporal nature of video object detection. To tackle this problem, we propose a comprehensive metric, average delay (AD), to measure and compare detection delay. To facilitate delay evaluation, we carefully select a subset of ImageNet VID, which we name as ImageNet VIDT with an emphasis on complex trajectories. By extensively evaluating a wide range of detectors on VIDT, we show that most methods drastically increase the detection delay but still preserve AP well. In other words, AP is not sensitive enough to reflect the temporal characteristics of a video object detector. Our results suggest that video object detection methods should be additionally evaluated with a delay metric, particularly for latency-critical applications such as autonomous vehicle perception.
This paper addresses the problem of common object detection, which aims to detect objects of similar categories from a set of images. Although it shares some similarities with the standard object detection and co-segmentation, common object detection, recently promoted by \cite{Jiang2019a}, has some unique advantages and challenges. First, it is designed to work on both closed-set and open-set conditions, a.k.a. known and unknown objects. Second, it must be able to match objects of the same category but not restricted to the same instance, texture, or posture. Third, it can distinguish multiple objects. In this work, we introduce the Single Stage Common Object Detection (SSCOD) to detect class-agnostic common objects from an image set. The proposed method is built upon the standard single-stage object detector. Furthermore, an embedded branch is introduced to generate the object's representation feature, and their similarity is measured by cosine distance. Experiments are conducted on PASCAL VOC 2007 and COCO 2014 datasets. While being simple and flexible, our proposed SSCOD built upon ATSSNet performs significantly better than the baseline of the standard object detection, while still be able to match objects of unknown categories. Our source code can be found at \href{https://github.com/cybercore-co-ltd/Single-Stage-Common-Object-Detection}{(URL)}
This work addresses the challenge of adapting dynamic deadline requirements for LiDAR object detection deep neural networks (DNNs). The computing latency of object detection is critically important to ensure safe and efficient navigation. However, state-of-the-art LiDAR object detection DNNs often exhibit significant latency, hindering their real-time performance on resource-constrained edge platforms. Therefore, a tradeoff between detection accuracy and latency should be dynamically managed at runtime to achieve optimum results. In this paper, we introduce VALO (Versatile Anytime algorithm for LiDAR Object detection), a novel data-centric approach that enables anytime computing of 3D LiDAR object detection DNNs. VALO employs a deadline-aware scheduler to selectively process input regions, making execution time and accuracy tradeoffs without architectural modifications. Additionally, it leverages efficient forecasting of past detection results to mitigate possible loss of accuracy due to partial processing of input. Finally, it utilizes a novel input reduction technique within its detection heads to significantly accelerate execution without sacrificing accuracy. We implement VALO on state-of-the-art 3D LiDAR object detection networks, namely CenterPoint and VoxelNext, and demonstrate its dynamic adaptability to a wide range of time constraints while achieving higher accuracy than the prior state-of-the-art. Code is available athttps://github.com/CSL-KU/VALO}{github.com/CSL-KU/VALO.
Existing CNNs-based salient object detection (SOD) heavily depends on the large-scale pixel-level annotations, which is labor-intensive, time-consuming, and expensive. By contrast, the sparse annotations become appealing to the salient object detection community. However, few efforts are devoted to learning salient object detection from sparse annotations, especially in the remote sensing field. In addition, the sparse annotation usually contains scanty information, which makes it challenging to train a well-performing model, resulting in its performance largely lagging behind the fully-supervised models. Although some SOD methods adopt some prior cues to improve the detection performance, they usually lack targeted discrimination of object boundaries and thus provide saliency maps with poor boundary localization. To this end, in this paper, we propose a novel weakly-supervised salient object detection framework to predict the saliency of remote sensing images from sparse scribble annotations. To implement it, we first construct the scribble-based remote sensing saliency dataset by relabelling an existing large-scale SOD dataset with scribbles, namely S-EOR dataset. After that, we present a novel scribble-based boundary-aware network (SBA-Net) for remote sensing salient object detection. Specifically, we design a boundary-aware module (BAM) to explore the object boundary semantics, which is explicitly supervised by the high-confidence object boundary (pseudo) labels generated by the boundary label generation (BLG) module, forcing the model to learn features that highlight the object structure and thus boosting the boundary localization of objects. Then, the boundary semantics are integrated with high-level features to guide the salient object detection under the supervision of scribble labels.
Object detection and tracking is a key task in autonomy. Specifically, 3D object detection and tracking have been an emerging hot topic recently. Although various methods have been proposed for object detection, uncertainty in the 3D detection and tracking tasks has been less explored. Uncertainty helps us tackle the error in the perception system and improve robustness. In this paper, we propose a method for improving target tracking performance by adding uncertainty regression to the SECOND detector, which is one of the most representative algorithms of 3D object detection. Our method estimates positional and dimensional uncertainties with Gaussian Negative Log-Likelihood (NLL) Loss for estimation and introduces von-Mises NLL Loss for angular uncertainty estimation. We fed the uncertainty output into a classical object tracking framework and proved that our method increased the tracking performance compared against the vanilla tracker with constant covariance assumption.
Autonomous driving, in recent years, has been receiving increasing attention for its potential to relieve drivers' burdens and improve the safety of driving. In modern autonomous driving pipelines, the perception system is an indispensable component, aiming to accurately estimate the status of surrounding environments and provide reliable observations for prediction and planning. 3D object detection, which intelligently predicts the locations, sizes, and categories of the critical 3D objects near an autonomous vehicle, is an important part of a perception system. This paper reviews the advances in 3D object detection for autonomous driving. First, we introduce the background of 3D object detection and discuss the challenges in this task. Second, we conduct a comprehensive survey of the progress in 3D object detection from the aspects of models and sensory inputs, including LiDAR-based, camera-based, and multi-modal detection approaches. We also provide an in-depth analysis of the potentials and challenges in each category of methods. Additionally, we systematically investigate the applications of 3D object detection in driving systems. Finally, we conduct a performance analysis of the 3D object detection approaches, and we further summarize the research trends over the years and prospect the future directions of this area.
The complex marine environment exacerbates the challenges of object detection manifold. Marine trash endangers the aquatic ecosystem, presenting a persistent challenge. Accurate detection of marine deposits is crucial for mitigating this harm. Our work addresses underwater object detection by enhancing image quality and evaluating detection methods. We use Detectron2's backbone with various base models and configurations for this task. We propose a novel channel stabilization technique alongside a simplified image enhancement model to reduce haze and color cast in training images, improving multi-scale object detection. Following image processing, we test different Detectron2 backbones for optimal detection accuracy. Additionally, we apply a sharpening filter with augmentation techniques to highlight object profiles for easier recognition. Results are demonstrated on the TrashCan Dataset, both instance and material versions. The best-performing backbone method incorporates our channel stabilization and augmentation techniques. We also compare our Detectron2 detection results with the Deformable Transformer. In the instance version of TrashCan 1.0, our method achieves a 9.53% absolute increase in average precision for small objects and a 7% absolute gain in bounding box detection compared to the baseline. The code will be available on Code: https://github.com/aliman80/Underwater- Object-Detection-via-Channel-Stablization
As the scale of object detection dataset is smaller than that of image recognition dataset ImageNet, transfer learning has become a basic training method for deep learning object detection models, which will pretrain the backbone network of object detection model on ImageNet dataset to extract features for classification and localization subtasks. However, the classification task focuses on the salient region features of object, while the location task focuses on the edge features of object, so there is certain deviation between the features extracted by pretrained backbone network and the features used for localization task. In order to solve this problem, a decoupled self attention(DSA) module is proposed for one stage object detection models in this paper. DSA includes two decoupled self-attention branches, so it can extract appropriate features for different tasks. It is located between FPN and head networks of subtasks, so it is used to extract global features based on FPN fused features for different tasks independently. Although the network of DSA module is simple, but it can effectively improve the performance of object detection, also it can be easily embedded in many detection models. Our experiments are based on the representative one-stage detection model RetinaNet. In COCO dataset, when ResNet50 and ResNet101 are used as backbone networks, the detection performances can be increased by 0.4% AP and 0.5% AP respectively. When DSA module and object confidence task are applied in RetinaNet together, the detection performances based on ResNet50 and ResNet101 can be increased by 1.0% AP and 1.4% AP respectively. The experiment results show the effectiveness of DSA module. Code is at: https://github.com/chenzuge1/DSANet.git.
In this paper, we address the 3D object detection task by capturing multi-level contextual information with the self-attention mechanism and multi-scale feature fusion. Most existing 3D object detection methods recognize objects individually, without giving any consideration on contextual information between these objects. Comparatively, we propose Multi-Level Context VoteNet (MLCVNet) to recognize 3D objects correlatively, building on the state-of-the-art VoteNet. We introduce three context modules into the voting and classifying stages of VoteNet to encode contextual information at different levels. Specifically, a Patch-to-Patch Context (PPC) module is employed to capture contextual information between the point patches, before voting for their corresponding object centroid points. Subsequently, an Object-to-Object Context (OOC) module is incorporated before the proposal and classification stage, to capture the contextual information between object candidates. Finally, a Global Scene Context (GSC) module is designed to learn the global scene context. We demonstrate these by capturing contextual information at patch, object and scene levels. Our method is an effective way to promote detection accuracy, achieving new state-of-the-art detection performance on challenging 3D object detection datasets, i.e., SUN RGBD and ScanNet. We also release our code at https://github.com/NUAAXQ/MLCVNet.
When training object detection models on synthetic data, it is important to make the distribution of synthetic data as close as possible to the distribution of real data. We investigate specifically the impact of object placement distribution, keeping all other aspects of synthetic data fixed. Our experiment, training a 3D vehicle detection model in CARLA and testing on KITTI, demonstrates a substantial improvement resulting from improving the object placement distribution.
3D object detection is fundamentally important for various emerging applications, including autonomous driving and robotics. A key requirement for training an accurate 3D object detector is the availability of a large amount of LiDAR-based point cloud data. Unfortunately, labeling point cloud data is extremely challenging, as accurate 3D bounding boxes and semantic labels are required for each potential object. This paper proposes a unified active 3D object detection framework, for greatly reducing the labeling cost of training 3D object detectors. Our framework is based on a novel formulation of submodular optimization, specifically tailored to the problem of active 3D object detection. In particular, we address two fundamental challenges associated with active 3D object detection: data imbalance and the need to cover the distribution of the data, including LiDAR-based point cloud data of varying difficulty levels. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance with high computational efficiency compared to existing active learning methods. The code is available at https://github.com/RuiyuM/STONE.
Most recent 6D object pose estimation methods first use object detection to obtain 2D bounding boxes before actually regressing the pose. However, the general object detection methods they use are ill-suited to handle cluttered scenes, thus producing poor initialization to the subsequent pose network. To address this, we propose a rigidity-aware detection method exploiting the fact that, in 6D pose estimation, the target objects are rigid. This lets us introduce an approach to sampling positive object regions from the entire visible object area during training, instead of naively drawing samples from the bounding box center where the object might be occluded. As such, every visible object part can contribute to the final bounding box prediction, yielding better detection robustness. Key to the success of our approach is a visibility map, which we propose to build using a minimum barrier distance between every pixel in the bounding box and the box boundary. Our results on seven challenging 6D pose estimation datasets evidence that our method outperforms general detection frameworks by a large margin. Furthermore, combined with a pose regression network, we obtain state-of-the-art pose estimation results on the challenging BOP benchmark.
3D object detection has recently become popular due to many applications in robotics, augmented reality, autonomy, and image retrieval. We introduce the Objectron dataset to advance the state of the art in 3D object detection and foster new research and applications, such as 3D object tracking, view synthesis, and improved 3D shape representation. The dataset contains object-centric short videos with pose annotations for nine categories and includes 4 million annotated images in 14,819 annotated videos. We also propose a new evaluation metric, 3D Intersection over Union, for 3D object detection. We demonstrate the usefulness of our dataset in 3D object detection tasks by providing baseline models trained on this dataset. Our dataset and evaluation source code are available online at http://www.objectron.dev
We present a novel approach for oriented object detection, named TricubeNet, which localizes oriented objects using visual cues ($i.e.,$ heatmap) instead of oriented box offsets regression. We represent each object as a 2D Tricube kernel and extract bounding boxes using simple image-processing algorithms. Our approach is able to (1) obtain well-arranged boxes from visual cues, (2) solve the angle discontinuity problem, and (3) can save computational complexity due to our anchor-free modeling. To further boost the performance, we propose some effective techniques for size-invariant loss, reducing false detections, extracting rotation-invariant features, and heatmap refinement. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our TricubeNet, we experiment on various tasks for weakly-occluded oriented object detection: detection in an aerial image, densely packed object image, and text image. The extensive experimental results show that our TricubeNet is quite effective for oriented object detection. Code is available at https://github.com/qjadud1994/TricubeNet.
We propose InstructDET, a data-centric method for referring object detection (ROD) that localizes target objects based on user instructions. While deriving from referring expressions (REC), the instructions we leverage are greatly diversified to encompass common user intentions related to object detection. For one image, we produce tremendous instructions that refer to every single object and different combinations of multiple objects. Each instruction and its corresponding object bounding boxes (bbxs) constitute one training data pair. In order to encompass common detection expressions, we involve emerging vision-language model (VLM) and large language model (LLM) to generate instructions guided by text prompts and object bbxs, as the generalizations of foundation models are effective to produce human-like expressions (e.g., describing object property, category, and relationship). We name our constructed dataset as InDET. It contains images, bbxs and generalized instructions that are from foundation models. Our InDET is developed from existing REC datasets and object detection datasets, with the expanding potential that any image with object bbxs can be incorporated through using our InstructDET method. By using our InDET dataset, we show that a conventional ROD model surpasses existing methods on standard REC datasets and our InDET test set. Our data-centric method InstructDET, with automatic data expansion by leveraging foundation models, directs a promising field that ROD can be greatly diversified to execute common object detection instructions.
Inverted bottleneck layers, which are built upon depthwise convolutions, have been the predominant building blocks in state-of-the-art object detection models on mobile devices. In this work, we investigate the optimality of this design pattern over a broad range of mobile accelerators by revisiting the usefulness of regular convolutions. We discover that regular convolutions are a potent component to boost the latency-accuracy trade-off for object detection on accelerators, provided that they are placed strategically in the network via neural architecture search. By incorporating regular convolutions in the search space and directly optimizing the network architectures for object detection, we obtain a family of object detection models, MobileDets, that achieve state-of-the-art results across mobile accelerators. On the COCO object detection task, MobileDets outperform MobileNetV3+SSDLite by 1.7 mAP at comparable mobile CPU inference latencies. MobileDets also outperform MobileNetV2+SSDLite by 1.9 mAP on mobile CPUs, 3.7 mAP on Google EdgeTPU, 3.4 mAP on Qualcomm Hexagon DSP and 2.7 mAP on Nvidia Jetson GPU without increasing latency. Moreover, MobileDets are comparable with the state-of-the-art MnasFPN on mobile CPUs even without using the feature pyramid, and achieve better mAP scores on both EdgeTPUs and DSPs with up to 2x speedup. Code and models are available in the TensorFlow Object Detection API: https://github.com/tensorflow/models/tree/master/research/object_detection.
Object detectors are usually equipped with backbone networks designed for image classification. It might be sub-optimal because of the gap between the tasks of image classification and object detection. In this work, we present DetNAS to use Neural Architecture Search (NAS) for the design of better backbones for object detection. It is non-trivial because detection training typically needs ImageNet pre-training while NAS systems require accuracies on the target detection task as supervisory signals. Based on the technique of one-shot supernet, which contains all possible networks in the search space, we propose a framework for backbone search on object detection. We train the supernet under the typical detector training schedule: ImageNet pre-training and detection fine-tuning. Then, the architecture search is performed on the trained supernet, using the detection task as the guidance. This framework makes NAS on backbones very efficient. In experiments, we show the effectiveness of DetNAS on various detectors, for instance, one-stage RetinaNet and the two-stage FPN. We empirically find that networks searched on object detection shows consistent superiority compared to those searched on ImageNet classification. The resulting architecture achieves superior performance than hand-crafted networks on COCO with much less FLOPs complexity.
Most visual models are designed for sRGB images, yet RAW data offers significant advantages for object detection by preserving sensor information before ISP processing. This enables improved detection accuracy and more efficient hardware designs by bypassing the ISP. However, RAW object detection is challenging due to limited training data, unbalanced pixel distributions, and sensor noise. To address this, we propose SimROD, a lightweight and effective approach for RAW object detection. We introduce a Global Gamma Enhancement (GGE) module, which applies a learnable global gamma transformation with only four parameters, improving feature representation while keeping the model efficient. Additionally, we leverage the green channel's richer signal to enhance local details, aligning with the human eye's sensitivity and Bayer filter design. Extensive experiments on multiple RAW object detection datasets and detectors demonstrate that SimROD outperforms state-of-the-art methods like RAW-Adapter and DIAP while maintaining efficiency. Our work highlights the potential of RAW data for real-world object detection. Code is available at https://ocean146.github.io/SimROD2025/.
Salient object detection is evaluated using binary ground truth with the labels being salient object class and background. In this paper, we corroborate based on three subjective experiments on a novel image dataset that objects in natural images are inherently perceived to have varying levels of importance. Our dataset, named SalMoN (saliency in multi-object natural images), has 588 images containing multiple objects. The subjective experiments performed record spontaneous attention and perception through eye fixation duration, point clicking and rectangle drawing. As object saliency in a multi-object image is inherently multi-level, we propose that salient object detection must be evaluated for the capability to detect all multi-level salient objects apart from the salient object class detection capability. For this purpose, we generate multi-level maps as ground truth corresponding to all the dataset images using the results of the subjective experiments, with the labels being multi-level salient objects and background. We then propose the use of mean absolute error, Kendall's rank correlation and average area under precision-recall curve to evaluate existing salient object detection methods on our multi-level saliency ground truth dataset. Approaches that represent saliency detection on images as local-global hierarchical processing of a graph perform well in our dataset.
Recent camera-based 3D object detection methods have introduced sequential frames to improve the detection performance hoping that multiple frames would mitigate the large depth estimation error. Despite improved detection performance, prior works rely on naive fusion methods (e.g., concatenation) or are limited to static scenes (e.g., temporal stereo), neglecting the importance of the motion cue of objects. These approaches do not fully exploit the potential of sequential images and show limited performance improvements. To address this limitation, we propose a novel 3D object detection model, P2D (Predict to Detect), that integrates a prediction scheme into a detection framework to explicitly extract and leverage motion features. P2D predicts object information in the current frame using solely past frames to learn temporal motion features. We then introduce a novel temporal feature aggregation method that attentively exploits Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) features based on predicted object information, resulting in accurate 3D object detection. Experimental results demonstrate that P2D improves mAP and NDS by 3.0% and 3.7% compared to the sequential image-based baseline, illustrating that incorporating a prediction scheme can significantly improve detection accuracy.