Intuitively, the appearance of true object boundaries varies from image to image. Hence the usual monolithic approach of training a single boundary predictor and applying it to all images regardless of their content is bound to be suboptimal. In this paper we therefore propose situational object boundary detection: We first define a variety of situations and train a specialized object boundary detector for each of them using [Dollar and Zitnick 2013]. Then given a test image, we classify it into these situations using its context, which we model by global image appearance. We apply the corresponding situational object boundary detectors, and fuse them based on the classification probabilities. In experiments on ImageNet, Microsoft COCO, and Pascal VOC 2012 segmentation we show that our situational object boundary detection gives significant improvements over a monolithic approach. Additionally, our method substantially outperforms [Hariharan et al. 2011] on semantic contour detection on their SBD dataset.
How can a single fully convolutional neural network (FCN) perform on object detection? We introduce DenseBox, a unified end-to-end FCN framework that directly predicts bounding boxes and object class confidences through all locations and scales of an image. Our contribution is two-fold. First, we show that a single FCN, if designed and optimized carefully, can detect multiple different objects extremely accurately and efficiently. Second, we show that when incorporating with landmark localization during multi-task learning, DenseBox further improves object detection accuray. We present experimental results on public benchmark datasets including MALF face detection and KITTI car detection, that indicate our DenseBox is the state-of-the-art system for detecting challenging objects such as faces and cars.
Sample assignment plays a prominent part in modern object detection approaches. However, most existing methods rely on manual design to assign positive / negative samples, which do not explicitly establish the relationships between sample assignment and object detection performance. In this work, we propose a novel dynamic sample assignment scheme based on hyper-parameter search. We first define the number of positive samples assigned to each ground truth as the hyper-parameters and employ a surrogate optimization algorithm to derive the optimal choices. Then, we design a dynamic sample assignment procedure to dynamically select the optimal number of positives at each training iteration. Experiments demonstrate that the resulting HPS-Det brings improved performance over different object detection baselines. Moreover, We analyze the hyper-parameter reusability when transferring between different datasets and between different backbones for object detection, which exhibits the superiority and versatility of our method.
The field of artificial intelligence is built on object detection techniques. YOU ONLY LOOK ONCE (YOLO) algorithm and it's more evolved versions are briefly described in this research survey. This survey is all about YOLO and convolution neural networks (CNN)in the direction of real time object detection.YOLO does generalized object representation more effectively without precision losses than other object detection models.CNN architecture models have the ability to eliminate highlights and identify objects in any given image. When implemented appropriately, CNN models can address issues like deformity diagnosis, creating educational or instructive application, etc. This article reached atnumber of observations and perspective findings through the analysis.Also it provides support for the focused visual information and feature extraction in the financial and other industries, highlights the method of target detection and feature selection, and briefly describe the development process of YOLO algorithm.
Federated learning (FL) has emerged as a promising approach for training machine learning models on decentralized data without compromising data privacy. In this paper, we propose a FL algorithm for object detection in quality inspection tasks using YOLOv5 as the object detection algorithm and Federated Averaging (FedAvg) as the FL algorithm. We apply this approach to a manufacturing use-case where multiple factories/clients contribute data for training a global object detection model while preserving data privacy on a non-IID dataset. Our experiments demonstrate that our FL approach achieves better generalization performance on the overall clients' test dataset and generates improved bounding boxes around the objects compared to models trained using local clients' datasets. This work showcases the potential of FL for quality inspection tasks in the manufacturing industry and provides valuable insights into the performance and feasibility of utilizing YOLOv5 and FedAvg for federated object detection.
Object detection models commonly deployed on uncrewed aerial systems (UAS) focus on identifying objects in the visible spectrum using Red-Green-Blue (RGB) imagery. However, there is growing interest in fusing RGB with thermal long wave infrared (LWIR) images to increase the performance of object detection machine learning (ML) models. Currently LWIR ML models have received less research attention, especially for both ground- and air-based platforms, leading to a lack of baseline performance metrics evaluating LWIR, RGB and LWIR-RGB fused object detection models. Therefore, this research contributes such quantitative metrics to the literature. The results found that the ground-based blended RGB-LWIR model exhibited superior performance compared to the RGB or LWIR approaches, achieving a mAP of 98.4%. Additionally, the blended RGB-LWIR model was also the only object detection model to work in both day and night conditions, providing superior operational capabilities. This research additionally contributes a novel labelled training dataset of 12,600 images for RGB, LWIR, and RGB-LWIR fused imagery, collected from ground-based and air-based platforms, enabling further multispectral machine-driven object detection research.
Advancements in cross-modal feature extraction and integration have significantly enhanced performance in few-shot learning tasks. However, current multi-modal object detection (MM-OD) methods often experience notable performance degradation when encountering substantial domain shifts. We propose that incorporating rich textual information can enable the model to establish a more robust knowledge relationship between visual instances and their corresponding language descriptions, thereby mitigating the challenges of domain shift. Specifically, we focus on the problem of Cross-Domain Multi-Modal Few-Shot Object Detection (CDMM-FSOD) and introduce a meta-learning-based framework designed to leverage rich textual semantics as an auxiliary modality to achieve effective domain adaptation. Our new architecture incorporates two key components: (i) A multi-modal feature aggregation module, which aligns visual and linguistic feature embeddings to ensure cohesive integration across modalities. (ii) A rich text semantic rectification module, which employs bidirectional text feature generation to refine multi-modal feature alignment, thereby enhancing understanding of language and its application in object detection. We evaluate the proposed method on common cross-domain object detection benchmarks and demonstrate that it significantly surpasses existing few-shot object detection approaches.
We introduce YOLO9000, a state-of-the-art, real-time object detection system that can detect over 9000 object categories. First we propose various improvements to the YOLO detection method, both novel and drawn from prior work. The improved model, YOLOv2, is state-of-the-art on standard detection tasks like PASCAL VOC and COCO. At 67 FPS, YOLOv2 gets 76.8 mAP on VOC 2007. At 40 FPS, YOLOv2 gets 78.6 mAP, outperforming state-of-the-art methods like Faster RCNN with ResNet and SSD while still running significantly faster. Finally we propose a method to jointly train on object detection and classification. Using this method we train YOLO9000 simultaneously on the COCO detection dataset and the ImageNet classification dataset. Our joint training allows YOLO9000 to predict detections for object classes that don't have labelled detection data. We validate our approach on the ImageNet detection task. YOLO9000 gets 19.7 mAP on the ImageNet detection validation set despite only having detection data for 44 of the 200 classes. On the 156 classes not in COCO, YOLO9000 gets 16.0 mAP. But YOLO can detect more than just 200 classes; it predicts detections for more than 9000 different object categories. And it still runs in real-time.
Real-time object localization on edge devices is fundamental for numerous applications, ranging from surveillance to industrial automation. Traditional frameworks, such as object detection, segmentation, and keypoint detection, struggle in resource-constrained environments, often resulting in substantial target omissions. To address these challenges, we introduce OCDet, a lightweight Object Center Detection framework optimized for edge devices with NPUs. OCDet predicts heatmaps representing object center probabilities and extracts center points through peak identification. Unlike prior methods using fixed Gaussian distribution, we introduce Generalized Centerness (GC) to generate ground truth heatmaps from bounding box annotations, providing finer spatial details without additional manual labeling. Built on NPU-friendly Semantic FPN with MobileNetV4 backbones, OCDet models are trained by our Balanced Continuous Focal Loss (BCFL), which alleviates data imbalance and focuses training on hard negative examples for probability regression tasks. Leveraging the novel Center Alignment Score (CAS) with Hungarian matching, we demonstrate that OCDet consistently outperforms YOLO11 in object center detection, achieving up to 23% higher CAS while requiring 42% fewer parameters, 34% less computation, and 64% lower NPU latency. When compared to keypoint detection frameworks, OCDet achieves substantial CAS improvements up to 186% using identical models. By integrating GC, BCFL, and CAS, OCDet establishes a new paradigm for efficient and robust object center detection on edge devices with NPUs. The code is released at https://github.com/chen-xin-94/ocdet.
Object detection for street-level objects can be applied to various use cases, from car and traffic detection to the self-driving car system. Therefore, finding the best object detection algorithm is essential to apply it effectively. Many object detection algorithms have been released, and many have compared object detection algorithms, but few have compared the latest algorithms, such as YOLOv5, primarily which focus on street-level objects. This paper compares various one-stage detector algorithms; SSD MobileNetv2 FPN-lite 320x320, YOLOv3, YOLOv4, YOLOv5l, and YOLOv5s for street-level object detection within real-time images. The experiment utilizes a modified Udacity Self Driving Car Dataset with 3,169 images. Dataset is split into train, validation, and test; Then, it is preprocessed and augmented using rescaling, hue shifting, and noise. Each algorithm is then trained and evaluated. Based on the experiments, the algorithms have produced decent results according to the inference time and the values of their precision, recall, F1-Score, and Mean Average Precision (mAP). The results also shows that YOLOv5l outperforms the other algorithms in terms of accuracy with a mAP@.5 of 0.593, MobileNetv2 FPN-lite has the fastest inference time among the others with only 3.20ms inference time. It is also found that YOLOv5s is the most efficient, with it having a YOLOv5l accuracy and a speed almost as quick as the MobileNetv2 FPN-lite. This shows that various algorithm are suitable for street-level object detection and viable enough to be used in self-driving car.
Regular object detection methods output rectangle bounding boxes, which are unable to accurately describe the actual object shapes. Instance segmentation methods output pixel-level labels, which are computationally expensive for real-time applications. Therefore, a polygon representation is needed to achieve precise shape alignment, while retaining low computation cost. We develop a novel Deformable Polar Polygon Object Detection method (DPPD) to detect objects in polygon shapes. In particular, our network predicts, for each object, a sparse set of flexible vertices to construct the polygon, where each vertex is represented by a pair of angle and distance in the Polar coordinate system. To enable training, both ground truth and predicted polygons are densely resampled to have the same number of vertices with equal-spaced raypoints. The resampling operation is fully differentable, allowing gradient back-propagation. Sparse polygon predicton ensures high-speed runtime inference while dense resampling allows the network to learn object shapes with high precision. The polygon detection head is established on top of an anchor-free and NMS-free network architecture. DPPD has been demonstrated successfully in various object detection tasks for autonomous driving such as traffic-sign, crosswalk, vehicle and pedestrian objects.
Although accuracy and other common metrics can provide a useful window into the performance of an object detection model, they lack a deeper view of the model's decision process. Regardless of the quality of the training data and process, the features that an object detection model learns cannot be guaranteed. A model may learn a relationship between certain background context, i.e., scene level objects, and the presence of the labeled classes. Furthermore, standard performance verification and metrics would not identify this phenomenon. This paper presents a new black box explainability method for additional verification of object detection models by finding the impact of scene level objects on the identification of the objects within the image. By comparing the accuracies of a model on test data with and without certain scene level objects, the contributions of these objects to the model's performance becomes clearer. The experiment presented here will assess the impact of buildings and people in image context on the detection of emergency road vehicles by a fine-tuned YOLOv8 model. A large increase in accuracy in the presence of a scene level object will indicate the model's reliance on that object to make its detections. The results of this research lead to providing a quantitative explanation of the object detection model's decision process, enabling a deeper understanding of the model's performance.
In recent years, deep neural networks have been widely used for building high-performance Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems for computer vision applications. Object detection is a fundamental task in computer vision, which has been greatly progressed through developing large and intricate AI models. However, the lack of transparency is a big challenge that may not allow the widespread adoption of these models. Explainable artificial intelligence is a field of research where methods are developed to help users understand the behavior, decision logics, and vulnerabilities of AI systems. Previously, few explanation methods were developed for object detection based on random masking. However, random masks may raise some issues regarding the actual importance of pixels within an image. In this paper, we design and implement a black-box explanation method named Black-box Object Detection Explanation by Masking (BODEM) through adopting a hierarchical random masking approach for object detection systems. We propose a hierarchical random masking framework in which coarse-grained masks are used in lower levels to find salient regions within an image, and fine-grained mask are used to refine the salient regions in higher levels. Experimentations on various object detection datasets and models showed that BODEM can effectively explain the behavior of object detectors. Moreover, our method outperformed Detector Randomized Input Sampling for Explanation (D-RISE) and Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanations (LIME) with respect to different quantitative measures of explanation effectiveness. The experimental results demonstrate that BODEM can be an effective method for explaining and validating object detection systems in black-box testing scenarios.
Small object detection has major applications in the fields of UAVs, surveillance, farming and many others. In this work we investigate the performance of state of the art Yolo based object detection models for the task of small object detection as they are one of the most popular and easy to use object detection models. We evaluated YOLOv5 and YOLOX models in this study. We also investigate the effects of slicing aided inference and fine-tuning the model for slicing aided inference. We used the VisDrone2019Det dataset for training and evaluating our models. This dataset is challenging in the sense that most objects are relatively small compared to the image sizes. This work aims to benchmark the YOLOv5 and YOLOX models for small object detection. We have seen that sliced inference increases the AP50 score in all experiments, this effect was greater for the YOLOv5 models compared to the YOLOX models. The effects of sliced fine-tuning and sliced inference combined produced substantial improvement for all models. The highest AP50 score was achieved by the YOLOv5- Large model on the VisDrone2019Det test-dev subset with the score being 48.8.
Falling objects from buildings can cause severe injuries to pedestrians due to the great impact force they exert. Although surveillance cameras are installed around some buildings, it is challenging for humans to capture such events in surveillance videos due to the small size and fast motion of falling objects, as well as the complex background. Therefore, it is necessary to develop methods to automatically detect falling objects around buildings in surveillance videos. To facilitate the investigation of falling object detection, we propose a large, diverse video dataset called FADE (FAlling Object DEtection around Buildings) for the first time. FADE contains 1,881 videos from 18 scenes, featuring 8 falling object categories, 4 weather conditions, and 4 video resolutions. Additionally, we develop a new object detection method called FADE-Net, which effectively leverages motion information and produces small-sized but high-quality proposals for detecting falling objects around buildings. Importantly, our method is extensively evaluated and analyzed by comparing it with the previous approaches used for generic object detection, video object detection, and moving object detection on the FADE dataset. Experimental results show that the proposed FADE-Net significantly outperforms other methods, providing an effective baseline for future research. The dataset and code are publicly available at https://fadedataset.github.io/FADE.github.io/.
3D object detection is an essential task for achieving autonomous driving. Existing anchor-based detection methods rely on empirical heuristics setting of anchors, which makes the algorithms lack elegance. In recent years, we have witnessed the rise of several generative models, among which diffusion models show great potential for learning the transformation of two distributions. Our proposed Diff3Det migrates the diffusion model to proposal generation for 3D object detection by considering the detection boxes as generative targets. During training, the object boxes diffuse from the ground truth boxes to the Gaussian distribution, and the decoder learns to reverse this noise process. In the inference stage, the model progressively refines a set of random boxes to the prediction results. We provide detailed experiments on the KITTI benchmark and achieve promising performance compared to classical anchor-based 3D detection methods.
We present two new fisheye image datasets for training face and object detection models: VOC-360 and Wider-360. The fisheye images are created by post-processing regular images collected from two well-known datasets, VOC2012 and Wider Face, using a model for mapping regular to fisheye images implemented in Matlab. VOC-360 contains 39,575 fisheye images for object detection, segmentation, and classification. Wider-360 contains 63,897 fisheye images for face detection. These datasets will be useful for developing face and object detectors as well as segmentation modules for fisheye images while the efforts to collect and manually annotate true fisheye images are underway.
3D object detection is a key module for safety-critical robotics applications such as autonomous driving. For these applications, we care most about how the detections affect the ego-agent's behavior and safety (the egocentric perspective). Intuitively, we seek more accurate descriptions of object geometry when it's more likely to interfere with the ego-agent's motion trajectory. However, current detection metrics, based on box Intersection-over-Union (IoU), are object-centric and aren't designed to capture the spatio-temporal relationship between objects and the ego-agent. To address this issue, we propose a new egocentric measure to evaluate 3D object detection, namely Support Distance Error (SDE). Our analysis based on SDE reveals that the egocentric detection quality is bounded by the coarse geometry of the bounding boxes. Given the insight that SDE would benefit from more accurate geometry descriptions, we propose to represent objects as amodal contours, specifically amodal star-shaped polygons, and devise a simple model, StarPoly, to predict such contours. Our experiments on the large-scale Waymo Open Dataset show that SDE better reflects the impact of detection quality on the ego-agent's safety compared to IoU; and the estimated contours from StarPoly consistently improve the egocentric detection quality over recent 3D object detectors.
Object detection in reduced visibility has become a prominent research area. The existing techniques are not accurate enough in recognizing objects under such circumstances. This paper introduces a new foggy object detection method through a two-staged architecture of region identification from input images and detecting objects in such regions. The paper confirms notable improvements of the proposed method's accuracy and detection time over existing techniques.
Weakly supervised object detection (WSOD) using only image-level annotations has attracted growing attention over the past few years. Existing approaches using multiple instance learning easily fall into local optima, because such mechanism tends to learn from the most discriminative object in an image for each category. Therefore, these methods suffer from missing object instances which degrade the performance of WSOD. To address this problem, this paper introduces an end-to-end object instance mining (OIM) framework for weakly supervised object detection. OIM attempts to detect all possible object instances existing in each image by introducing information propagation on the spatial and appearance graphs, without any additional annotations. During the iterative learning process, the less discriminative object instances from the same class can be gradually detected and utilized for training. In addition, we design an object instance reweighted loss to learn larger portion of each object instance to further improve the performance. The experimental results on two publicly available databases, VOC 2007 and 2012, demonstrate the efficacy of proposed approach.