The evaluation of object detection models is usually performed by optimizing a single metric, e.g. mAP, on a fixed set of datasets, e.g. Microsoft COCO and Pascal VOC. Due to image retrieval and annotation costs, these datasets consist largely of images found on the web and do not represent many real-life domains that are being modelled in practice, e.g. satellite, microscopic and gaming, making it difficult to assert the degree of generalization learned by the model. We introduce the Roboflow-100 (RF100) consisting of 100 datasets, 7 imagery domains, 224,714 images, and 805 class labels with over 11,170 labelling hours. We derived RF100 from over 90,000 public datasets, 60 million public images that are actively being assembled and labelled by computer vision practitioners in the open on the web application Roboflow Universe. By releasing RF100, we aim to provide a semantically diverse, multi-domain benchmark of datasets to help researchers test their model's generalizability with real-life data. RF100 download and benchmark replication are available on GitHub.
Existing deep Thermal InfraRed (TIR) trackers usually use the feature models of RGB trackers for representation. However, these feature models learned on RGB images are neither effective in representing TIR objects nor taking fine-grained TIR information into consideration. To this end, we develop a multi-task framework to learn the TIR-specific discriminative features and fine-grained correlation features for TIR tracking. Specifically, we first use an auxiliary classification network to guide the generation of TIR-specific discriminative features for distinguishing the TIR objects belonging to different classes. Second, we design a fine-grained aware module to capture more subtle information for distinguishing the TIR objects belonging to the same class. These two kinds of features complement each other and recognize TIR objects in the levels of inter-class and intra-class respectively. These two feature models are learned using a multi-task matching framework and are jointly optimized on the TIR tracking task. In addition, we develop a large-scale TIR training dataset to train the network for adapting the model to the TIR domain. Extensive experimental results on three benchmarks show that the proposed algorithm achieves a relative gain of 10% over the baseline and performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods. Codes and the proposed TIR dataset are available at {https://github.com/QiaoLiuHit/MMNet}.
Thermal infrared (TIR) pedestrian tracking is one of the important components among numerous applications of computer vision, which has a major advantage: it can track pedestrians in total darkness. The ability to evaluate the TIR pedestrian tracker fairly, on a benchmark dataset, is significant for the development of this field. However, there is not a benchmark dataset. In this paper, we develop a TIR pedestrian tracking dataset for the TIR pedestrian tracker evaluation. The dataset includes 60 thermal sequences with manual annotations. Each sequence has nine attribute labels for the attribute based evaluation. In addition to the dataset, we carry out the large-scale evaluation experiments on our benchmark dataset using nine publicly available trackers. The experimental results help us understand the strengths and weaknesses of these trackers.In addition, in order to gain more insight into the TIR pedestrian tracker, we divide its functions into three components: feature extractor, motion model, and observation model. Then, we conduct three comparison experiments on our benchmark dataset to validate how each component affects the tracker's performance. The findings of these experiments provide some guidelines for future research. The dataset and evaluation toolkit can be downloaded at {https://github.com/QiaoLiuHit/PTB-TIR_Evaluation_toolkit}.
We introduce Deep Thermal Imaging, a new approach for close-range automatic recognition of materials to enhance the understanding of people and ubiquitous technologies of their proximal environment. Our approach uses a low-cost mobile thermal camera integrated into a smartphone to capture thermal textures. A deep neural network classifies these textures into material types. This approach works effectively without the need for ambient light sources or direct contact with materials. Furthermore, the use of a deep learning network removes the need to handcraft the set of features for different materials. We evaluated the performance of the system by training it to recognise 32 material types in both indoor and outdoor environments. Our approach produced recognition accuracies above 98% in 14,860 images of 15 indoor materials and above 89% in 26,584 images of 17 outdoor materials. We conclude by discussing its potentials for real-time use in HCI applications and future directions.