This work-in-progress paper presents results on the feasibility of single-shot object detection on microcontrollers using YOLO. Single-shot object detectors like YOLO are widely used, however due to their complexity mainly on larger GPU-based platforms. We present microYOLO, which can be used on Cortex-M based microcontrollers, such as the OpenMV H7 R2, achieving about 3.5 FPS when classifying 128x128 RGB images while using less than 800 KB Flash and less than 350 KB RAM. Furthermore, we share experimental results for three different object detection tasks, analyzing the accuracy of microYOLO on them.
Outdoor 3D object detection has played an essential role in the environment perception of autonomous driving. In complicated traffic situations, precise object recognition provides indispensable information for prediction and planning in the dynamic system, improving self-driving safety and reliability. However, with the vehicle's veering, the constant rotation of the surrounding scenario makes a challenge for the perception systems. Yet most existing methods have not focused on alleviating the detection accuracy impairment brought by the vehicle's rotation, especially in outdoor 3D detection. In this paper, we propose DuEqNet, which first introduces the concept of equivariance into 3D object detection network by leveraging a hierarchical embedded framework. The dual-equivariance of our model can extract the equivariant features at both local and global levels, respectively. For the local feature, we utilize the graph-based strategy to guarantee the equivariance of the feature in point cloud pillars. In terms of the global feature, the group equivariant convolution layers are adopted to aggregate the local feature to achieve the global equivariance. In the experiment part, we evaluate our approach with different baselines in 3D object detection tasks and obtain State-Of-The-Art performance. According to the results, our model presents higher accuracy on orientation and better prediction efficiency. Moreover, our dual-equivariance strategy exhibits the satisfied plug-and-play ability on various popular object detection frameworks to improve their performance.
With the rise of deep convolutional neural networks, object detection has achieved prominent advances in past years. However, such prosperity could not camouflage the unsatisfactory situation of Small Object Detection (SOD), one of the notoriously challenging tasks in computer vision, owing to the poor visual appearance and noisy representation caused by the intrinsic structure of small targets. In addition, large-scale dataset for benchmarking small object detection methods remains a bottleneck. In this paper, we first conduct a thorough review of small object detection. Then, to catalyze the development of SOD, we construct two large-scale Small Object Detection dAtasets (SODA), SODA-D and SODA-A, which focus on the Driving and Aerial scenarios respectively. SODA-D includes 24828 high-quality traffic images and 278433 instances of nine categories. For SODA-A, we harvest 2513 high resolution aerial images and annotate 872069 instances over nine classes. The proposed datasets, as we know, are the first-ever attempt to large-scale benchmarks with a vast collection of exhaustively annotated instances tailored for multi-category SOD. Finally, we evaluate the performance of mainstream methods on SODA. We expect the released benchmarks could facilitate the development of SOD and spawn more breakthroughs in this field. Datasets and codes are available at: \url{https://shaunyuan22.github.io/SODA}.
Deep learning based object detection has achieved great success. However, these supervised learning methods are data-hungry and time-consuming. This restriction makes them unsuitable for limited data and urgent tasks, especially in the applications of remote sensing. Inspired by the ability of humans to quickly learn new visual concepts from very few examples, we propose a training-free, one-shot geospatial object detection framework for remote sensing images. It consists of (1) a feature extractor with remote sensing domain knowledge, (2) a multi-level feature fusion method, (3) a novel similarity metric method, and (4) a 2-stage object detection pipeline. Experiments on sewage treatment plant and airport detections show that proposed method has achieved a certain effect. Our method can serve as a baseline for training-free, one-shot geospatial object detection.
Non-maximum suppression is an integral part of the object detection pipeline. First, it sorts all detection boxes on the basis of their scores. The detection box M with the maximum score is selected and all other detection boxes with a significant overlap (using a pre-defined threshold) with M are suppressed. This process is recursively applied on the remaining boxes. As per the design of the algorithm, if an object lies within the predefined overlap threshold, it leads to a miss. To this end, we propose Soft-NMS, an algorithm which decays the detection scores of all other objects as a continuous function of their overlap with M. Hence, no object is eliminated in this process. Soft-NMS obtains consistent improvements for the coco-style mAP metric on standard datasets like PASCAL VOC 2007 (1.7% for both R-FCN and Faster-RCNN) and MS-COCO (1.3% for R-FCN and 1.1% for Faster-RCNN) by just changing the NMS algorithm without any additional hyper-parameters. Using Deformable-RFCN, Soft-NMS improves state-of-the-art in object detection from 39.8% to 40.9% with a single model. Further, the computational complexity of Soft-NMS is the same as traditional NMS and hence it can be efficiently implemented. Since Soft-NMS does not require any extra training and is simple to implement, it can be easily integrated into any object detection pipeline. Code for Soft-NMS is publicly available on GitHub (http://bit.ly/2nJLNMu).
Ego-centric Traffic Anomaly Detection (TAD) aims to identify abnormal events in videos captured by dashboard-mounted cameras in vehicles. Compared to anomaly detection in roadside surveillance videos, ego-centric TAD poses greater challenges due to the dynamic backgrounds caused by vehicle motion. Previous frame-level methods are often vulnerable to interference from these dynamic backgrounds and struggle to detect small objects located at a distance or off-center. To address these challenges, we propose an object-prompt enhanced method that integrates detected traffic objects into a frame-level TAD framework. Our approach introduces an object-prompt scheme comprising an object prompt encoder, along with two cross-attention-based aggregation modules: an instance-wise aggregation module for fusing information between object instances and the scene, and a relation-wise aggregation module for capturing relationships inter-objects. Additionally, we design an instance-level loss to supervise anomaly detection at the object level. Our method effectively mitigates interference from dynamic backgrounds, improves the detection of distant or off-center anomalies, and enables precise spatial localization of anomalies. Experimental results on the DoTA and DADA-2000 datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance.
This article provides a step by step development of designing a Object Detection scheme using the HOG based Feature Pyramid aligned with the concept of Template Matching.
We provide a detailed analysis of convolutional neural networks which are pre-trained on the task of object detection. To this end, we train detectors on large datasets like OpenImagesV4, ImageNet Localization and COCO. We analyze how well their features generalize to tasks like image classification, semantic segmentation and object detection on small datasets like PASCAL-VOC, Caltech-256, SUN-397, Flowers-102 etc. Some important conclusions from our analysis are --- 1) Pre-training on large detection datasets is crucial for fine-tuning on small detection datasets, especially when precise localization is needed. For example, we obtain 81.1% mAP on the PASCAL-VOC dataset at 0.7 IoU after pre-training on OpenImagesV4, which is 7.6% better than the recently proposed DeformableConvNetsV2 which uses ImageNet pre-training. 2) Detection pre-training also benefits other localization tasks like semantic segmentation but adversely affects image classification. 3) Features for images (like avg. pooled Conv5) which are similar in the object detection feature space are likely to be similar in the image classification feature space but the converse is not true. 4) Visualization of features reveals that detection neurons have activations over an entire object, while activations for classification networks typically focus on parts. Therefore, detection networks are poor at classification when multiple instances are present in an image or when an instance only covers a small fraction of an image.
In this paper, we present a novel deep neural network architecture for joint class-agnostic object segmentation and grasp detection for robotic picking tasks using a parallel-plate gripper. We introduce depth-aware Coordinate Convolution (CoordConv), a method to increase accuracy for point proposal based object instance segmentation in complex scenes without adding any additional network parameters or computation complexity. Depth-aware CoordConv uses depth data to extract prior information about the location of an object to achieve highly accurate object instance segmentation. These resulting segmentation masks, combined with predicted grasp candidates, lead to a complete scene description for grasping using a parallel-plate gripper. We evaluate the accuracy of grasp detection and instance segmentation on challenging robotic picking datasets, namely Sil\'eane and OCID_grasp, and show the benefit of joint grasp detection and segmentation on a real-world robotic picking task.
Multispectral object detection, utilizing RGB and TIR (thermal infrared) modalities, is widely recognized as a challenging task. It requires not only the effective extraction of features from both modalities and robust fusion strategies, but also the ability to address issues such as spectral discrepancies, spatial misalignment, and environmental dependencies between RGB and TIR images. These challenges significantly hinder the generalization of multispectral detection systems across diverse scenarios. Although numerous studies have attempted to overcome these limitations, it remains difficult to clearly distinguish the performance gains of multispectral detection systems from the impact of these "optimization techniques". Worse still, despite the rapid emergence of high-performing single-modality detection models, there is still a lack of specialized training techniques that can effectively adapt these models for multispectral detection tasks. The absence of a standardized benchmark with fair and consistent experimental setups also poses a significant barrier to evaluating the effectiveness of new approaches. To this end, we propose the first fair and reproducible benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the training "techniques", which systematically classifies existing multispectral object detection methods, investigates their sensitivity to hyper-parameters, and standardizes the core configurations. A comprehensive evaluation is conducted across multiple representative multispectral object detection datasets, utilizing various backbone networks and detection frameworks. Additionally, we introduce an efficient and easily deployable multispectral object detection framework that can seamlessly optimize high-performing single-modality models into dual-modality models, integrating our advanced training techniques.
Object detection models shipped with camera-equipped edge devices cannot cover the objects of interest for every user. Therefore, the incremental learning capability is a critical feature for a robust and personalized object detection system that many applications would rely on. In this paper, we present an efficient yet practical system, RILOD, to incrementally train an existing object detection model such that it can detect new object classes without losing its capability to detect old classes. The key component of RILOD is a novel incremental learning algorithm that trains end-to-end for one-stage deep object detection models only using training data of new object classes. Specifically to avoid catastrophic forgetting, the algorithm distills three types of knowledge from the old model to mimic the old model's behavior on object classification, bounding box regression and feature extraction. In addition, since the training data for the new classes may not be available, a real-time dataset construction pipeline is designed to collect training images on-the-fly and automatically label the images with both category and bounding box annotations. We have implemented RILOD under both edge-cloud and edge-only setups. Experiment results show that the proposed system can learn to detect a new object class in just a few minutes, including both dataset construction and model training. In comparison, traditional fine-tuning based method may take a few hours for training, and in most cases would also need a tedious and costly manual dataset labeling step.
In this paper we present YOLOX-ViT, a novel object detection model, and investigate the efficacy of knowledge distillation for model size reduction without sacrificing performance. Focused on underwater robotics, our research addresses key questions about the viability of smaller models and the impact of the visual transformer layer in YOLOX. Furthermore, we introduce a new side-scan sonar image dataset, and use it to evaluate our object detector's performance. Results show that knowledge distillation effectively reduces false positives in wall detection. Additionally, the introduced visual transformer layer significantly improves object detection accuracy in the underwater environment. The source code of the knowledge distillation in the YOLOX-ViT is at https://github.com/remaro-network/KD-YOLOX-ViT.
Adverse weather conditions often impair the quality of captured images, inevitably inducing cutting-edge object detection models for advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving. In this paper, we raise an intriguing question: can the combination of image restoration and object detection enhance detection performance in adverse weather conditions? To answer it, we propose an effective architecture that bridges image dehazing and object detection together via guidance information and task-driven learning to achieve detection-friendly dehazing, termed FriendNet. FriendNet aims to deliver both high-quality perception and high detection capacity. Different from existing efforts that intuitively treat image dehazing as pre-processing, FriendNet establishes a positive correlation between these two tasks. Clean features generated by the dehazing network potentially contribute to improvements in object detection performance. Conversely, object detection crucially guides the learning process of the image dehazing network under the task-driven learning scheme. We shed light on how downstream tasks can guide upstream dehazing processes, considering both network architecture and learning objectives. We design Guidance Fusion Block (GFB) and Guidance Attention Block (GAB) to facilitate the integration of detection information into the network. Furthermore, the incorporation of the detection task loss aids in refining the optimization process. Additionally, we introduce a new Physics-aware Feature Enhancement Block (PFEB), which integrates physics-based priors to enhance the feature extraction and representation capabilities. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art methods on both image quality and detection precision. Our source code is available at https://github.com/fanyihua0309/FriendNet.
Multi-scale features have been proven highly effective for object detection but often come with huge and even prohibitive extra computation costs, especially for the recent Transformer-based detectors. In this paper, we propose Iterative Multi-scale Feature Aggregation (IMFA) -- a generic paradigm that enables efficient use of multi-scale features in Transformer-based object detectors. The core idea is to exploit sparse multi-scale features from just a few crucial locations, and it is achieved with two novel designs. First, IMFA rearranges the Transformer encoder-decoder pipeline so that the encoded features can be iteratively updated based on the detection predictions. Second, IMFA sparsely samples scale-adaptive features for refined detection from just a few keypoint locations under the guidance of prior detection predictions. As a result, the sampled multi-scale features are sparse yet still highly beneficial for object detection. Extensive experiments show that the proposed IMFA boosts the performance of multiple Transformer-based object detectors significantly yet with only slight computational overhead.
The Unified Object Detection (UOD) task aims to achieve object detection of all merged categories through training on multiple datasets, and is of great significance in comprehensive object detection scenarios. In this paper, we conduct a thorough analysis of the cross datasets missing annotations issue, and propose an Online Pseudo-Label Unified Object Detection scheme. Our method uses a periodically updated teacher model to generate pseudo-labels for the unlabelled objects in each sub-dataset. This periodical update strategy could better ensure that the accuracy of the teacher model reaches the local maxima and maximized the quality of pseudo-labels. In addition, we survey the influence of overlapped region proposals on the accuracy of box regression. We propose a category specific box regression and a pseudo-label RPN head to improve the recall rate of the Region Proposal Network (PRN). Our experimental results on common used benchmarks (\eg COCO, Object365 and OpenImages) indicates that our online pseudo-label UOD method achieves higher accuracy than existing SOTA methods.
While prior works have investigated and developed computational models capable of object detection, models still struggle to reliably interpret images with motion blur and small objects. Moreover, none of these models are specifically designed for handheld object detection. In this work, we present SHOP (Small Handheld Object Pipeline), a pipeline that reliably and efficiently interprets blurry images containing handheld objects. The specific models used in each stage of the pipeline are flexible and can be changed based on performance requirements. First, images are deblurred and then run through a pose detection system where areas-of-interest are proposed around the hands of any people present. Next, object detection is performed on the images by a single-stage object detector. Finally, the proposed areas-of-interest are used to filter out low confidence detections. Testing on a handheld subset of Microsoft Common Objects in Context (MS COCO) demonstrates that this 3 stage process results in a 70 percent decrease in false positives while only reducing true positives by 17 percent in its strongest configuration. We also present a subset of MS COCO consisting solely of handheld objects that can be used to continue the development of handheld object detection methods. https://github.com/spider-sense/SHOP
Finetuning from a pretrained deep model is found to yield state-of-the-art performance for many vision tasks. This paper investigates many factors that influence the performance in finetuning for object detection. There is a long-tailed distribution of sample numbers for classes in object detection. Our analysis and empirical results show that classes with more samples have higher impact on the feature learning. And it is better to make the sample number more uniform across classes. Generic object detection can be considered as multiple equally important tasks. Detection of each class is a task. These classes/tasks have their individuality in discriminative visual appearance representation. Taking this individuality into account, we cluster objects into visually similar class groups and learn deep representations for these groups separately. A hierarchical feature learning scheme is proposed. In this scheme, the knowledge from the group with large number of classes is transferred for learning features in its sub-groups. Finetuned on the GoogLeNet model, experimental results show 4.7% absolute mAP improvement of our approach on the ImageNet object detection dataset without increasing much computational cost at the testing stage.
In this work, we build a modular-designed codebase, formulate strong training recipes, design an error diagnosis toolbox, and discuss current methods for image-based 3D object detection. In particular, different from other highly mature tasks, e.g., 2D object detection, the community of image-based 3D object detection is still evolving, where methods often adopt different training recipes and tricks resulting in unfair evaluations and comparisons. What is worse, these tricks may overwhelm their proposed designs in performance, even leading to wrong conclusions. To address this issue, we build a module-designed codebase and formulate unified training standards for the community. Furthermore, we also design an error diagnosis toolbox to measure the detailed characterization of detection models. Using these tools, we analyze current methods in-depth under varying settings and provide discussions for some open questions, e.g., discrepancies in conclusions on KITTI-3D and nuScenes datasets, which have led to different dominant methods for these datasets. We hope that this work will facilitate future research in image-based 3D object detection. Our codes will be released at \url{https://github.com/OpenGVLab/3dodi}
Object localization in general environments is a fundamental part of vision systems. While dominating on the COCO benchmark, recent Transformer-based detection methods are not competitive in diverse domains. Moreover, these methods still struggle to very accurately estimate the object bounding boxes in complex environments. We introduce Cascade-DETR for high-quality universal object detection. We jointly tackle the generalization to diverse domains and localization accuracy by proposing the Cascade Attention layer, which explicitly integrates object-centric information into the detection decoder by limiting the attention to the previous box prediction. To further enhance accuracy, we also revisit the scoring of queries. Instead of relying on classification scores, we predict the expected IoU of the query, leading to substantially more well-calibrated confidences. Lastly, we introduce a universal object detection benchmark, UDB10, that contains 10 datasets from diverse domains. While also advancing the state-of-the-art on COCO, Cascade-DETR substantially improves DETR-based detectors on all datasets in UDB10, even by over 10 mAP in some cases. The improvements under stringent quality requirements are even more pronounced. Our code and models will be released at https://github.com/SysCV/cascade-detr.
Bounding-box regression is a popular technique to refine or predict localization boxes in recent object detection approaches. Typically, bounding-box regressors are trained to regress from either region proposals or fixed anchor boxes to nearby bounding boxes of a pre-defined target object classes. This paper investigates whether the technique is generalizable to unseen classes and is transferable to other tasks beyond supervised object detection. To this end, we propose a class-agnostic and anchor-free box regressor, dubbed Universal Bounding-Box Regressor (UBBR), which predicts a bounding box of the nearest object from any given box. Trained on a relatively small set of annotated images, UBBR successfully generalizes to unseen classes, and can be used to improve localization in many vision problems. We demonstrate its effectivenss on weakly supervised object detection and object discovery.