Efficient generation of high-quality object proposals is an essential step in state-of-the-art object detection systems based on deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN) features. Current object proposal algorithms are computationally inefficient in processing high resolution images containing small objects, which makes them the bottleneck in object detection systems. In this paper we present effective methods to detect objects for high resolution images. We combine two complementary strategies. The first approach is to predict bounding boxes based on adjacent visual features. The second approach uses high level image features to guide a two-step search process that adaptively focuses on regions that are likely to contain small objects. We extract features required for the two strategies by utilizing a pre-trained DCNN model known as AlexNet. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm by showing its performance on a high-resolution image subset of the SUN 2012 object detection dataset.
The accuracy of the object detection model depends on whether the anchor boxes effectively trained. Because of the small number of GT boxes or object target is invariant in the training phase, cannot effectively train anchor boxes. Improving detection accuracy by extending the dataset is an effective way. We propose a data enhancement method based on the foreground-background separation model. While this model uses a binary image of object target random perturb original dataset image. Perturbation methods include changing the color channel of the object, adding salt noise to the object, and enhancing contrast. The main contribution of this paper is to propose a data enhancement method based on GAN and improve detection accuracy of DSSD. Results are shown on both PASCAL VOC2007 and PASCAL VOC2012 dataset. Our model with 321x321 input achieves 78.7% mAP on the VOC2007 test, 76.6% mAP on the VOC2012 test.
Unbiased confidence estimates of neural networks are crucial especially for safety-critical applications. Many methods have been developed to calibrate biased confidence estimates. Though there is a variety of methods for classification, the field of object detection has not been addressed yet. Therefore, we present a novel framework to measure and calibrate biased (or miscalibrated) confidence estimates of object detection methods. The main difference to related work in the field of classifier calibration is that we also use additional information of the regression output of an object detector for calibration. Our approach allows, for the first time, to obtain calibrated confidence estimates with respect to image location and box scale. In addition, we propose a new measure to evaluate miscalibration of object detectors. Finally, we show that our developed methods outperform state-of-the-art calibration models for the task of object detection and provides reliable confidence estimates across different locations and scales.
We propose a novel object localization methodology with the purpose of boosting the localization accuracy of state-of-the-art object detection systems. Our model, given a search region, aims at returning the bounding box of an object of interest inside this region. To accomplish its goal, it relies on assigning conditional probabilities to each row and column of this region, where these probabilities provide useful information regarding the location of the boundaries of the object inside the search region and allow the accurate inference of the object bounding box under a simple probabilistic framework. For implementing our localization model, we make use of a convolutional neural network architecture that is properly adapted for this task, called LocNet. We show experimentally that LocNet achieves a very significant improvement on the mAP for high IoU thresholds on PASCAL VOC2007 test set and that it can be very easily coupled with recent state-of-the-art object detection systems, helping them to boost their performance. Finally, we demonstrate that our detection approach can achieve high detection accuracy even when it is given as input a set of sliding windows, thus proving that it is independent of box proposal methods.
We present a novel modular object detection convolutional neural network that significantly improves the accuracy of object detection. The network consists of two stages in a hierarchical structure. The first stage is a network that detects general classes. The second stage consists of separate networks to refine the classification and localization of each of the general classes objects. Compared to a state of the art object detection networks the classification error in the modular network is improved by approximately 3-5 times, from 12% to 2.5 %-4.5%. This network is easy to implement and has a 0.94 mAP. The network architecture can be a platform to improve the accuracy of widespread state of the art object detection networks and other kinds of deep learning networks. We show that a deep learning network initialized by transfer learning becomes more accurate as the number of classes it later trained to detect becomes smaller.
Self-attention is one of the most successful designs in deep learning, which calculates the similarity of different tokens and reconstructs the feature based on the attention matrix. Originally designed for NLP, self-attention is also popular in computer vision, and can be categorized into pixel-level attention and patch-level attention. In object detection, RoI features can be seen as patches from base feature maps. This paper aims to apply the attention module to RoI features to improve performance. Instead of employing an original self-attention module, we choose the external attention module, a modified self-attention with reduced parameters. With the proposed double head structure and the Positional Encoding module, our method can achieve promising performance in object detection. The comprehensive experiments show that it achieves promising performance, especially in the underwater object detection dataset. The code will be avaiable in: https://github.com/zsyasd/Excavating-RoI-Attention-for-Underwater-Object-Detection
Detecting and localizing objects in the real 3D space, which plays a crucial role in scene understanding, is particularly challenging given only a monocular image due to the geometric information loss during imagery projection. We propose MonoGRNet for the amodal 3D object detection from a monocular image via geometric reasoning in both the observed 2D projection and the unobserved depth dimension. MonoGRNet decomposes the monocular 3D object detection task into four sub-tasks including 2D object detection, instance-level depth estimation, projected 3D center estimation and local corner regression. The task decomposition significantly facilitates the monocular 3D object detection, allowing the target 3D bounding boxes to be efficiently predicted in a single forward pass, without using object proposals, post-processing or the computationally expensive pixel-level depth estimation utilized by previous methods. In addition, MonoGRNet flexibly adapts to both fully and weakly supervised learning, which improves the feasibility of our framework in diverse settings. Experiments are conducted on KITTI, Cityscapes and MS COCO datasets. Results demonstrate the promising performance of our framework in various scenarios.
The complex nature of combining localization and classification in object detection has resulted in the flourished development of methods. Previous works tried to improve the performance in various object detection heads but failed to present a unified view. In this paper, we present a novel dynamic head framework to unify object detection heads with attentions. By coherently combining multiple self-attention mechanisms between feature levels for scale-awareness, among spatial locations for spatial-awareness, and within output channels for task-awareness, the proposed approach significantly improves the representation ability of object detection heads without any computational overhead. Further experiments demonstrate that the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed dynamic head on the COCO benchmark. With a standard ResNeXt-101-DCN backbone, we largely improve the performance over popular object detectors and achieve a new state-of-the-art at 54.0 AP. Furthermore, with latest transformer backbone and extra data, we can push current best COCO result to a new record at 60.6 AP. The code will be released at https://github.com/microsoft/DynamicHead.
3D object detection using LiDAR data remains a key task for applications like autonomous driving and robotics. Unlike in the case of 2D images, LiDAR data is almost always collected over a period of time. However, most work in this area has focused on performing detection independent of the temporal domain. In this paper we present 3D-FCT, a Siamese network architecture that utilizes temporal information to simultaneously perform the related tasks of 3D object detection and tracking. The network is trained to predict the movement of an object based on the correlation features of extracted keypoints across time. Calculating correlation across keypoints only allows for real-time object detection. We further extend the multi-task objective to include a tracking regression loss. Finally, we produce high accuracy detections by linking short-term object tracklets into long term tracks based on the predicted tracks. Our proposed method is evaluated on the KITTI tracking dataset where it is shown to provide an improvement of 5.57% mAP over a state-of-the-art approach.
3D object detection models that exploit both LiDAR and camera sensor features are top performers in large-scale autonomous driving benchmarks. A transformer is a popular network architecture used for this task, in which so-called object queries act as candidate objects. Initializing these object queries based on current sensor inputs is a common practice. For this, existing methods strongly rely on LiDAR data however, and do not fully exploit image features. Besides, they introduce significant latency. To overcome these limitations we propose EfficientQ3M, an efficient, modular, and multimodal solution for object query initialization for transformer-based 3D object detection models. The proposed initialization method is combined with a "modality-balanced" transformer decoder where the queries can access all sensor modalities throughout the decoder. In experiments, we outperform the state of the art in transformer-based LiDAR object detection on the competitive nuScenes benchmark and showcase the benefits of input-dependent multimodal query initialization, while being more efficient than the available alternatives for LiDAR-camera initialization. The proposed method can be applied with any combination of sensor modalities as input, demonstrating its modularity.
In this work, we propose TransTrack, a simple but efficient scheme to solve the multiple object tracking problems. TransTrack leverages the transformer architecture, which is an attention-based query-key mechanism. It applies object features from the previous frame as a query of the current frame and introduces a set of learned object queries to enable detecting new-coming objects. It builds up a novel joint-detection-and-tracking paradigm by accomplishing object detection and object association in a single shot, simplifying complicated multi-step settings in tracking-by-detection methods. On MOT17 and MOT20 benchmark, TransTrack achieves 74.5\% and 64.5\% MOTA, respectively, competitive to the state-of-the-art methods. We expect TransTrack to provide a novel perspective for multiple object tracking. The code is available at: \url{https://github.com/PeizeSun/TransTrack}.
Image-based 3D object detection is widely employed in applications such as autonomous vehicles and robotics, yet current systems struggle with generalisation due to complex problem setup and limited training data. We introduce a novel pipeline that decouples 3D detection from 2D detection and depth prediction, using a diffusion-based approach to improve accuracy and support category-agnostic detection. Additionally, we introduce the Normalised Hungarian Distance (NHD) metric for an accurate evaluation of 3D detection results, addressing the limitations of traditional IoU and GIoU metrics. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art accuracy and strong generalisation across various object categories and datasets.
This study explores the potential of super-resolution techniques in enhancing object detection accuracy in football. Given the sport's fast-paced nature and the critical importance of precise object (e.g. ball, player) tracking for both analysis and broadcasting, super-resolution could offer significant improvements. We investigate how advanced image processing through super-resolution impacts the accuracy and reliability of object detection algorithms in processing football match footage. Our methodology involved applying state-of-the-art super-resolution techniques to a diverse set of football match videos from SoccerNet, followed by object detection using Faster R-CNN. The performance of these algorithms, both with and without super-resolution enhancement, was rigorously evaluated in terms of detection accuracy. The results indicate a marked improvement in object detection accuracy when super-resolution preprocessing is applied. The improvement of object detection through the integration of super-resolution techniques yields significant benefits, especially for low-resolution scenarios, with a notable 12\% increase in mean Average Precision (mAP) at an IoU (Intersection over Union) range of 0.50:0.95 for 320x240 size images when increasing the resolution fourfold using RLFN. As the dimensions increase, the magnitude of improvement becomes more subdued; however, a discernible improvement in the quality of detection is consistently evident. Additionally, we discuss the implications of these findings for real-time sports analytics, player tracking, and the overall viewing experience. The study contributes to the growing field of sports technology by demonstrating the practical benefits and limitations of integrating super-resolution techniques in football analytics and broadcasting.
A lot a research is focused on object detection and it has achieved significant advances with deep learning techniques in recent years. Inspite of the existing research, these algorithms are not usually optimal for dealing with sequences or images captured by drone-based platforms, due to various challenges such as view point change, scales, density of object distribution and occlusion. In this paper, we develop a model for detection of objects in drone images using the VisDrone2019 DET dataset. Using the RetinaNet model as our base, we modify the anchor scales to better handle the detection of dense distribution and small size of the objects. We explicitly model the channel interdependencies by using "Squeeze-and-Excitation" (SE) blocks that adaptively recalibrates channel-wise feature responses. This helps to bring significant improvements in performance at a slight additional computational cost. Using this architecture for object detection, we build a custom DeepSORT network for object detection on the VisDrone2019 MOT dataset by training a custom Deep Association network for the algorithm.
Object detection is a mature problem in autonomous driving with pedestrian detection being one of the first deployed algorithms. It has been comprehensively studied in the literature. However, object detection is relatively less explored for fisheye cameras used for surround-view near field sensing. The standard bounding box representation fails in fisheye cameras due to heavy radial distortion, particularly in the periphery. To mitigate this, we explore extending the standard object detection output representation of bounding box. We design rotated bounding boxes, ellipse, generic polygon as polar arc/angle representations and define an instance segmentation mIOU metric to analyze these representations. The proposed model FisheyeDetNet with polygon outperforms others and achieves a mAP score of 49.5 % on Valeo fisheye surround-view dataset for automated driving applications. This dataset has 60K images captured from 4 surround-view cameras across Europe, North America and Asia. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first detailed study on object detection on fisheye cameras for autonomous driving scenarios.
Machine learning models can leak information regarding the dataset they have trained. In this paper, we present the first membership inference attack against black-boxed object detection models that determines whether the given data records are used in the training. To attack the object detection model, we devise a novel method named as called a canvas method, in which predicted bounding boxes are drawn on an empty image for the attack model input. Based on the experiments, we successfully reveal the membership status of privately sensitive data trained using one-stage and two-stage detection models. We then propose defense strategies and also conduct a transfer attack between the models and datasets. Our results show that object detection models are also vulnerable to inference attacks like other models.
We introduce Dynamic Tiling, a model-agnostic, adaptive, and scalable approach for small object detection, anchored in our inference-data-centric philosophy. Dynamic Tiling starts with non-overlapping tiles for initial detections and utilizes dynamic overlapping rates along with a tile minimizer. This dual approach effectively resolves fragmented objects, improves detection accuracy, and minimizes computational overhead by reducing the number of forward passes through the object detection model. Adaptable to a variety of operational environments, our method negates the need for laborious recalibration. Additionally, our large-small filtering mechanism boosts the detection quality across a range of object sizes. Overall, Dynamic Tiling outperforms existing model-agnostic uniform cropping methods, setting new benchmarks for efficiency and accuracy.
Object detection is a fundamental step for automated video analysis in many vision applications. Object detection in a video is usually performed by object detectors or background subtraction techniques. Often, an object detector requires manually labeled examples to train a binary classifier, while background subtraction needs a training sequence that contains no objects to build a background model. To automate the analysis, object detection without a separate training phase becomes a critical task. People have tried to tackle this task by using motion information. But existing motion-based methods are usually limited when coping with complex scenarios such as nonrigid motion and dynamic background. In this paper, we show that above challenges can be addressed in a unified framework named DEtecting Contiguous Outliers in the LOw-rank Representation (DECOLOR). This formulation integrates object detection and background learning into a single process of optimization, which can be solved by an alternating algorithm efficiently. We explain the relations between DECOLOR and other sparsity-based methods. Experiments on both simulated data and real sequences demonstrate that DECOLOR outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches and it can work effectively on a wide range of complex scenarios.
Recently, Neural architecture search has achieved great success on classification tasks for mobile devices. The backbone network for object detection is usually obtained on the image classification task. However, the architecture which is searched through the classification task is sub-optimal because of the gap between the task of image and object detection. As while work focuses on backbone network architecture search for mobile device object detection is limited, mainly because the backbone always requires expensive ImageNet pre-training. Accordingly, it is necessary to study the approach of network architecture search for mobile device object detection without expensive pre-training. In this work, we propose a mobile object detection backbone network architecture search algorithm which is a kind of evolutionary optimized method based on non-dominated sorting for NAS scenarios. It can quickly search to obtain the backbone network architecture within certain constraints. It better solves the problem of suboptimal linear combination accuracy and computational cost. The proposed approach can search the backbone networks with different depths, widths, or expansion sizes via a technique of weight mapping, making it possible to use NAS for mobile devices detection tasks a lot more efficiently. In our experiments, we verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach on YoloX-Lite, a lightweight version of the target detection framework. Under similar computational complexity, the accuracy of the backbone network architecture we search for is 2.0% mAP higher than MobileDet. Our improved backbone network can reduce the computational effort while improving the accuracy of the object detection network. To prove its effectiveness, a series of ablation studies have been carried out and the working mechanism has been analyzed in detail.
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel at descriptive tasks within images but often struggle with precise object localization, a critical element for reliable visual interpretation. In contrast, traditional object detection models provide high localization accuracy but frequently generate detections lacking contextual coherence due to limited modeling of inter-object relationships. To address this fundamental limitation, we introduce the \textbf{Visual-Linguistic Agent (VLA), a collaborative framework that combines the relational reasoning strengths of MLLMs with the precise localization capabilities of traditional object detectors. In the VLA paradigm, the MLLM serves as a central Linguistic Agent, working collaboratively with specialized Vision Agents for object detection and classification. The Linguistic Agent evaluates and refines detections by reasoning over spatial and contextual relationships among objects, while the classification Vision Agent offers corrective feedback to improve classification accuracy. This collaborative approach enables VLA to significantly enhance both spatial reasoning and object localization, addressing key challenges in multimodal understanding. Extensive evaluations on the COCO dataset demonstrate substantial performance improvements across multiple detection models, highlighting VLA's potential to set a new benchmark in accurate and contextually coherent object detection.