With the rapid advancement of autonomous driving technology, efficient and accurate object detection capabilities have become crucial factors in ensuring the safety and reliability of autonomous driving systems. However, in low-visibility environments such as hazy conditions, the performance of traditional object detection algorithms often degrades significantly, failing to meet the demands of autonomous driving. To address this challenge, this paper proposes two innovative deep learning models: YOLO-Vehicle and YOLO-Vehicle-Pro. YOLO-Vehicle is an object detection model tailored specifically for autonomous driving scenarios, employing multimodal fusion techniques to combine image and textual information for object detection. YOLO-Vehicle-Pro builds upon this foundation by introducing an improved image dehazing algorithm, enhancing detection performance in low-visibility environments. In addition to model innovation, this paper also designs and implements a cloud-edge collaborative object detection system, deploying models on edge devices and offloading partial computational tasks to the cloud in complex situations. Experimental results demonstrate that on the KITTI dataset, the YOLO-Vehicle-v1s model achieved 92.1% accuracy while maintaining a detection speed of 226 FPS and an inference time of 12ms, meeting the real-time requirements of autonomous driving. When processing hazy images, the YOLO-Vehicle-Pro model achieved a high accuracy of 82.3% mAP@50 on the Foggy Cityscapes dataset while maintaining a detection speed of 43 FPS.
This study presents an architectural analysis of YOLOv11, the latest iteration in the YOLO (You Only Look Once) series of object detection models. We examine the models architectural innovations, including the introduction of the C3k2 (Cross Stage Partial with kernel size 2) block, SPPF (Spatial Pyramid Pooling - Fast), and C2PSA (Convolutional block with Parallel Spatial Attention) components, which contribute in improving the models performance in several ways such as enhanced feature extraction. The paper explores YOLOv11's expanded capabilities across various computer vision tasks, including object detection, instance segmentation, pose estimation, and oriented object detection (OBB). We review the model's performance improvements in terms of mean Average Precision (mAP) and computational efficiency compared to its predecessors, with a focus on the trade-off between parameter count and accuracy. Additionally, the study discusses YOLOv11's versatility across different model sizes, from nano to extra-large, catering to diverse application needs from edge devices to high-performance computing environments. Our research provides insights into YOLOv11's position within the broader landscape of object detection and its potential impact on real-time computer vision applications.
Camouflaged Object Detection (COD) aims to detect objects with camouflaged properties. Although previous studies have focused on natural (animals and insects) and unnatural (artistic and synthetic) camouflage detection, plant camouflage has been neglected. However, plant camouflage plays a vital role in natural camouflage. Therefore, this paper introduces a new challenging problem of Plant Camouflage Detection (PCD). To address this problem, we introduce the PlantCamo dataset, which comprises 1,250 images with camouflaged plants representing 58 object categories in various natural scenes. To investigate the current status of plant camouflage detection, we conduct a large-scale benchmark study using 20+ cutting-edge COD models on the proposed dataset. Due to the unique characteristics of plant camouflage, including holes and irregular borders, we developed a new framework, named PCNet, dedicated to PCD. Our PCNet surpasses performance thanks to its multi-scale global feature enhancement and refinement. Finally, we discuss the potential applications and insights, hoping this work fills the gap in fine-grained COD research and facilitates further intelligent ecology research. All resources will be available on https://github.com/yjybuaa/PlantCamo.
Open-vocabulary object perception has become an important topic in artificial intelligence, which aims to identify objects with novel classes that have not been seen during training. Under this setting, open-vocabulary object detection (OVD) in a single image has been studied in many literature. However, open-vocabulary object tracking (OVT) from a video has been studied less, and one reason is the shortage of benchmarks. In this work, we have built a new large-scale benchmark for open-vocabulary multi-object tracking namely OVT-B. OVT-B contains 1,048 categories of objects and 1,973 videos with 637,608 bounding box annotations, which is much larger than the sole open-vocabulary tracking dataset, i.e., OVTAO-val dataset (200+ categories, 900+ videos). The proposed OVT-B can be used as a new benchmark to pave the way for OVT research. We also develop a simple yet effective baseline method for OVT. It integrates the motion features for object tracking, which is an important feature for MOT but is ignored in previous OVT methods. Experimental results have verified the usefulness of the proposed benchmark and the effectiveness of our method. We have released the benchmark to the public at https://github.com/Coo1Sea/OVT-B-Dataset.
The acquisition of inductive bias through point-level contrastive learning holds paramount significance in point cloud pre-training. However, the square growth in computational requirements with the scale of the point cloud poses a substantial impediment to the practical deployment and execution. To address this challenge, this paper proposes an Effective Point-level Contrastive Learning method for large-scale point cloud understanding dubbed \textbf{EPContrast}, which consists of AGContrast and ChannelContrast. In practice, AGContrast constructs positive and negative pairs based on asymmetric granularity embedding, while ChannelContrast imposes contrastive supervision between channel feature maps. EPContrast offers point-level contrastive loss while concurrently mitigating the computational resource burden. The efficacy of EPContrast is substantiated through comprehensive validation on S3DIS and ScanNetV2, encompassing tasks such as semantic segmentation, instance segmentation, and object detection. In addition, rich ablation experiments demonstrate remarkable bias induction capabilities under label-efficient and one-epoch training settings.
Ensuring safety in both autonomous driving and advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) depends critically on the efficient deployment of traffic sign recognition technology. While current methods show effectiveness, they often compromise between speed and accuracy. To address this issue, we present a novel real-time and efficient road sign detection network, YOLO-TS. This network significantly improves performance by optimizing the receptive fields of multi-scale feature maps to align more closely with the size distribution of traffic signs in various datasets. Moreover, our innovative feature-fusion strategy, leveraging the flexibility of Anchor-Free methods, allows for multi-scale object detection on a high-resolution feature map abundant in contextual information, achieving remarkable enhancements in both accuracy and speed. To mitigate the adverse effects of the grid pattern caused by dilated convolutions on the detection of smaller objects, we have devised a unique module that not only mitigates this grid effect but also widens the receptive field to encompass an extensive range of spatial contextual information, thus boosting the efficiency of information usage. Evaluation on challenging public datasets, TT100K and CCTSDB2021, demonstrates that YOLO-TS surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of both accuracy and speed. The code for our method will be available.
Large-scale visual-language pre-trained models (VLPMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance in downstream object detection through text prompts for natural scenes. However, their application to zero-shot nuclei detection on histopathology images remains relatively unexplored, mainly due to the significant gap between the characteristics of medical images and the web-originated text-image pairs used for pre-training. This paper aims to investigate the potential of the object-level VLPM, Grounded Language-Image Pre-training (GLIP), for zero-shot nuclei detection. Specifically, we propose an innovative auto-prompting pipeline, named AttriPrompter, comprising attribute generation, attribute augmentation, and relevance sorting, to avoid subjective manual prompt design. AttriPrompter utilizes VLPMs' text-to-image alignment to create semantically rich text prompts, which are then fed into GLIP for initial zero-shot nuclei detection. Additionally, we propose a self-trained knowledge distillation framework, where GLIP serves as the teacher with its initial predictions used as pseudo labels, to address the challenges posed by high nuclei density, including missed detections, false positives, and overlapping instances. Our method exhibits remarkable performance in label-free nuclei detection, outperforming all existing unsupervised methods and demonstrating excellent generality. Notably, this work highlights the astonishing potential of VLPMs pre-trained on natural image-text pairs for downstream tasks in the medical field as well. Code will be released at https://github.com/wuyongjianCODE/AttriPrompter.
Advances in lightweight neural networks have revolutionized computer vision in a broad range of IoT applications, encompassing remote monitoring and process automation. However, the detection of small objects, which is crucial for many of these applications, remains an underexplored area in current computer vision research, particularly for low-power embedded devices that host resource-constrained processors. To address said gap, this paper proposes an adaptive tiling method for lightweight and energy-efficient object detection networks, including YOLO-based models and the popular FOMO network. The proposed tiling enables object detection on low-power MCUs with no compromise on accuracy compared to large-scale detection models. The benefit of the proposed method is demonstrated by applying it to FOMO and TinyissimoYOLO networks on a novel RISC-V-based MCU with built-in ML accelerators. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed tiling method boosts the F1-score by up to 225% for both FOMO and TinyissimoYOLO networks while reducing the average object count error by up to 76% with FOMO and up to 89% for TinyissimoYOLO. Furthermore, the findings of this work indicate that using a soft F1 loss over the popular binary cross-entropy loss can serve as an implicit non-maximum suppression for the FOMO network. To evaluate the real-world performance, the networks are deployed on the RISC-V based GAP9 microcontroller from GreenWaves Technologies, showcasing the proposed method's ability to strike a balance between detection performance ($58% - 95%$ F1 score), low latency (0.6 ms/Inference - 16.2 ms/Inference}), and energy efficiency (31 uJ/Inference} - 1.27 mJ/Inference) while performing multiple predictions using high-resolution images on a MCU.
This paper is motivated by an interesting phenomenon: the performance of object detection lags behind that of instance segmentation (i.e., performance imbalance) when investigating the intermediate results from the beginning transformer decoder layer of MaskDINO (i.e., the SOTA model for joint detection and segmentation). This phenomenon inspires us to think about a question: will the performance imbalance at the beginning layer of transformer decoder constrain the upper bound of the final performance? With this question in mind, we further conduct qualitative and quantitative pre-experiments, which validate the negative impact of detection-segmentation imbalance issue on the model performance. To address this issue, this paper proposes DI-MaskDINO model, the core idea of which is to improve the final performance by alleviating the detection-segmentation imbalance. DI-MaskDINO is implemented by configuring our proposed De-Imbalance (DI) module and Balance-Aware Tokens Optimization (BATO) module to MaskDINO. DI is responsible for generating balance-aware query, and BATO uses the balance-aware query to guide the optimization of the initial feature tokens. The balance-aware query and optimized feature tokens are respectively taken as the Query and Key&Value of transformer decoder to perform joint object detection and instance segmentation. DI-MaskDINO outperforms existing joint object detection and instance segmentation models on COCO and BDD100K benchmarks, achieving +1.2 $AP^{box}$ and +0.9 $AP^{mask}$ improvements compared to SOTA joint detection and segmentation model MaskDINO. In addition, DI-MaskDINO also obtains +1.0 $AP^{box}$ improvement compared to SOTA object detection model DINO and +3.0 $AP^{mask}$ improvement compared to SOTA segmentation model Mask2Former.
An effective Fire and Smoke Detection (FSD) and analysis system is of paramount importance due to the destructive potential of fire disasters. However, many existing FSD methods directly employ generic object detection techniques without considering the transparency of fire and smoke, which leads to imprecise localization and reduces detection performance. To address this issue, a new Attentive Fire and Smoke Detection Model (a-FSDM) is proposed. This model not only retains the robust feature extraction and fusion capabilities of conventional detection algorithms but also redesigns the detection head specifically for transparent targets in FSD, termed the Attentive Transparency Detection Head (ATDH). In addition, Burning Intensity (BI) is introduced as a pivotal feature for fire-related downstream risk assessments in traditional FSD methodologies. Extensive experiments on multiple FSD datasets showcase the effectiveness and versatility of the proposed FSD model. The project is available at \href{https://xiaoyihan6.github.io/FSD/}{https://xiaoyihan6.github.io/FSD/}.
Object Detection is related to Computer Vision. Object detection enables detecting instances of objects in images and videos. Due to its increased utilization in surveillance, tracking system used in security and many others applications have propelled researchers to continuously derive more efficient and competitive algorithms. However, problems emerges while implementing it in real-time because of their dynamic environment and complex algorithms used in object detection. In the last few years, Convolution Neural Network (CNN) have emerged as a powerful tool for recognizing image content and in computer vision approach for most problems. In this paper, We revived begins the brief introduction of deep learning and object detection framework like Convolutional Neural Network(CNN), You only look once - version 4 (YOLOv4). Then we focus on our proposed object detection architectures along with some modifications. The traditional model detects a small object in images. We have some modifications to the model. Our proposed method gives the correct result with accuracy.
Current large open vision models could be useful for one and few-shot object recognition. Nevertheless, gradient-based re-training solutions are costly. On the other hand, open-vocabulary object detection models bring closer visual and textual concepts in the same latent space, allowing zero-shot detection via prompting at small computational cost. We propose a lightweight method to turn the latter into a one-shot or few-shot object recognition models without requiring textual descriptions. Our experiments on the TEgO dataset using the YOLO-World model as a base show that performance increases with the model size, the number of examples and the use of image augmentation.
We investigate the efficacy of data augmentations to close the domain gap in spaceborne computer vision, crucial for autonomous operations like on-orbit servicing. As the use of computer vision in space increases, challenges such as hostile illumination and low signal-to-noise ratios significantly hinder performance. While learning-based algorithms show promising results, their adoption is limited by the need for extensive annotated training data and the domain gap that arises from differences between synthesized and real-world imagery. This study explores domain generalization in terms of data augmentations -- classical color and geometric transformations, corruptions, and noise -- to enhance model performance across the domain gap. To this end, we conduct an large scale experiment using a hyperparameter optimization pipeline that samples hundreds of different configurations and searches for the best set to bridge the domain gap. As a reference task, we use 2D object detection and evaluate on the SPEED+ dataset that contains real hardware-in-the-loop satellite images in its test set. Moreover, we evaluate four popular object detectors, including Mask R-CNN, Faster R-CNN, YOLO-v7, and the open set detector GroundingDINO, and highlight their trade-offs between performance, inference speed, and training time. Our results underscore the vital role of data augmentations in bridging the domain gap, improving model performance, robustness, and reliability for critical space applications. As a result, we propose two novel data augmentations specifically developed to emulate the visual effects observed in orbital imagery. We conclude by recommending the most effective augmentations for advancing computer vision in challenging orbital environments. Code for training detectors and hyperparameter search will be made publicly available.
The Two-Stage Learning-to-Defer (L2D) framework has been extensively studied for classification and, more recently, regression tasks. However, many real-world applications require solving both tasks jointly in a multi-task setting. We introduce a novel Two-Stage L2D framework for multi-task learning that integrates classification and regression through a unified deferral mechanism. Our method leverages a two-stage surrogate loss family, which we prove to be both Bayes-consistent and $(\mathcal{G}, \mathcal{R})$-consistent, ensuring convergence to the Bayes-optimal rejector. We derive explicit consistency bounds tied to the cross-entropy surrogate and the $L_1$-norm of agent-specific costs, and extend minimizability gap analysis to the multi-expert two-stage regime. We also make explicit how shared representation learning--commonly used in multi-task models--affects these consistency guarantees. Experiments on object detection and electronic health record analysis demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach and highlight the limitations of existing L2D methods in multi-task scenarios.
Multi-modal fusion has played a vital role in multi-modal scene understanding. Most existing methods focus on cross-modal fusion involving two modalities, often overlooking more complex multi-modal fusion, which is essential for real-world applications like autonomous driving, where visible, depth, event, LiDAR, etc., are used. Besides, few attempts for multi-modal fusion, \emph{e.g.}, simple concatenation, cross-modal attention, and token selection, cannot well dig into the intrinsic shared and specific details of multiple modalities. To tackle the challenge, in this paper, we propose a Part-Whole Relational Fusion (PWRF) framework. For the first time, this framework treats multi-modal fusion as part-whole relational fusion. It routes multiple individual part-level modalities to a fused whole-level modality using the part-whole relational routing ability of Capsule Networks (CapsNets). Through this part-whole routing, our PWRF generates modal-shared and modal-specific semantics from the whole-level modal capsules and the routing coefficients, respectively. On top of that, modal-shared and modal-specific details can be employed to solve the issue of multi-modal scene understanding, including synthetic multi-modal segmentation and visible-depth-thermal salient object detection in this paper. Experiments on several datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed PWRF framework for multi-modal scene understanding. The source code has been released on https://github.com/liuyi1989/PWRF.
Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have achieved significant breakthroughs in various vision-language and vision-centric tasks based on auto-regressive modeling. However, these models typically focus on either vision-centric tasks, such as visual grounding and region description, or vision-language tasks, like image caption and multi-scenario VQAs. None of the LMMs have yet comprehensively unified both types of tasks within a single model, as seen in Large Language Models in the natural language processing field. Furthermore, even with abundant multi-task instruction-following data, directly stacking these data for universal capabilities extension remains challenging. To address these issues, we introduce a novel multi-dimension curated and consolidated multimodal dataset, named CCMD-8M, which overcomes the data barriers of unifying vision-centric and vision-language tasks through multi-level data curation and multi-task consolidation. More importantly, we present Griffon-G, a general large multimodal model that addresses both vision-centric and vision-language tasks within a single end-to-end paradigm. Griffon-G resolves the training collapse issue encountered during the joint optimization of these tasks, achieving better training efficiency. Evaluations across multimodal benchmarks, general Visual Question Answering (VQA) tasks, scene text-centric VQA tasks, document-related VQA tasks, Referring Expression Comprehension, and object detection demonstrate that Griffon-G surpasses the advanced LMMs and achieves expert-level performance in complicated vision-centric tasks.
An in-depth exploration of object detection and semantic segmentation is provided, combining theoretical foundations with practical applications. State-of-the-art advancements in machine learning and deep learning are reviewed, focusing on convolutional neural networks (CNNs), YOLO architectures, and transformer-based approaches such as DETR. The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques and large language models for enhancing object detection in complex environments is examined. Additionally, a comprehensive analysis of big data processing is presented, with emphasis on model optimization and performance evaluation metrics. By bridging the gap between traditional methods and modern deep learning frameworks, valuable insights are offered for researchers, data scientists, and engineers aiming to apply AI-driven methodologies to large-scale object detection tasks.
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.
Object tracking, especially animal tracking, is one of the key topics that attract a lot of attention due to its benefits of animal behavior understanding and monitoring. Recent state-of-the-art tracking methods are founded on deep learning architectures for object detection, appearance feature extraction and track association. Despite the good tracking performance, these methods are trained and evaluated on common objects such as human and cars. To perform on the animal, there is a need to create large datasets of different types in multiple conditions. The dataset construction comprises of data collection and data annotation. In this work, we put more focus on the latter task. Particularly, we renovate the well-known tool, LabelMe, so as to assist common user with or without in-depth knowledge about computer science to annotate the data with less effort. The new tool named as TrackMe inherits the simplicity, high compatibility with varied systems, minimal hardware requirement and convenient feature utilization from the predecessor. TrackMe is an upgraded version with essential features for multiple object tracking annotation.
Open-vocabulary object detection (OVD), detecting specific classes of objects using only their linguistic descriptions (e.g., class names) without any image samples, has garnered significant attention. However, in real-world applications, the target class concepts is often hard to describe in text and the only way to specify target objects is to provide their image examples, yet it is often challenging to obtain a good number of samples. Thus, there is a high demand from practitioners for few-shot object detection (FSOD). A natural question arises: Can the benefits of OVD extend to FSOD for object classes that are difficult to describe in text? Compared to traditional methods that learn only predefined classes (referred to in this paper as closed-set object detection, COD), can the extra cost of OVD be justified? To answer these questions, we propose a method to quantify the ``text-describability'' of object detection datasets using the zero-shot image classification accuracy with CLIP. This allows us to categorize various OD datasets with different text-describability and emprically evaluate the FSOD performance of OVD and COD methods within each category. Our findings reveal that: i) there is little difference between OVD and COD for object classes with low text-describability under equal conditions in OD pretraining; and ii) although OVD can learn from more diverse data than OD-specific data, thereby increasing the volume of training data, it can be counterproductive for classes with low-text-describability. These findings provide practitioners with valuable guidance amidst the recent advancements of OVD methods.