We introduce pluralistic salient object detection (PSOD), a novel task aimed at generating multiple plausible salient segmentation results for a given input image. Unlike conventional SOD methods that produce a single segmentation mask for salient objects, this new setting recognizes the inherent complexity of real-world images, comprising multiple objects, and the ambiguity in defining salient objects due to different user intentions. To study this task, we present two new SOD datasets "DUTS-MM" and "DUS-MQ", along with newly designed evaluation metrics. DUTS-MM builds upon the DUTS dataset but enriches the ground-truth mask annotations from three aspects which 1) improves the mask quality especially for boundary and fine-grained structures; 2) alleviates the annotation inconsistency issue; and 3) provides multiple ground-truth masks for images with saliency ambiguity. DUTS-MQ consists of approximately 100K image-mask pairs with human-annotated preference scores, enabling the learning of real human preferences in measuring mask quality. Building upon these two datasets, we propose a simple yet effective pluralistic SOD baseline based on a Mixture-of-Experts (MOE) design. Equipped with two prediction heads, it simultaneously predicts multiple masks using different query prompts and predicts human preference scores for each mask candidate. Extensive experiments and analyses underscore the significance of our proposed datasets and affirm the effectiveness of our PSOD framework.
K-Origins is a neural network layer designed to improve image-based network performances when learning colour, or intensities, is beneficial. Over 250 encoder-decoder convolutional networks are trained and tested on 16-bit synthetic data, demonstrating that K-Origins improves semantic segmentation accuracy in two scenarios: object detection with low signal-to-noise ratios, and segmenting multiple objects that are identical in shape but vary in colour. K-Origins generates output features from the input features, $\textbf{X}$, by the equation $\textbf{Y}_k = \textbf{X}-\textbf{J}\cdot w_k$ for each trainable parameter $w_k$, where $\textbf{J}$ is a matrix of ones. Additionally, networks with varying receptive fields were trained to determine optimal network depths based on the dimensions of target classes, suggesting that receptive field lengths should exceed object sizes. By ensuring a sufficient receptive field length and incorporating K-Origins, we can achieve better semantic network performance.
Recent developments in vision language models (VLM) have shown great potential for diverse applications related to image understanding. In this study, we have explored state-of-the-art VLM models for vision-based transportation engineering tasks such as image classification and object detection. The image classification task involves congestion detection and crack identification, whereas, for object detection, helmet violations were identified. We have applied open-source models such as CLIP, BLIP, OWL-ViT, Llava-Next, and closed-source GPT-4o to evaluate the performance of these state-of-the-art VLM models to harness the capabilities of language understanding for vision-based transportation tasks. These tasks were performed by applying zero-shot prompting to the VLM models, as zero-shot prompting involves performing tasks without any training on those tasks. It eliminates the need for annotated datasets or fine-tuning for specific tasks. Though these models gave comparative results with benchmark Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) models in the image classification tasks, for object localization tasks, it still needs improvement. Therefore, this study provides a comprehensive evaluation of the state-of-the-art VLM models highlighting the advantages and limitations of the models, which can be taken as the baseline for future improvement and wide-scale implementation.
Inter-image association modeling is crucial for co-salient object detection. Despite satisfactory performance, previous methods still have limitations on sufficient inter-image association modeling. Because most of them focus on image feature optimization under the guidance of heuristically calculated raw inter-image associations. They directly rely on raw associations which are not reliable in complex scenarios, and their image feature optimization approach is not explicit for inter-image association modeling. To alleviate these limitations, this paper proposes a deep association learning strategy that deploys deep networks on raw associations to explicitly transform them into deep association features. Specifically, we first create hyperassociations to collect dense pixel-pair-wise raw associations and then deploys deep aggregation networks on them. We design a progressive association generation module for this purpose with additional enhancement of the hyperassociation calculation. More importantly, we propose a correspondence-induced association condensation module that introduces a pretext task, i.e. semantic correspondence estimation, to condense the hyperassociations for computational burden reduction and noise elimination. We also design an object-aware cycle consistency loss for high-quality correspondence estimations. Experimental results in three benchmark datasets demonstrate the remarkable effectiveness of our proposed method with various training settings.
Optical music recognition (OMR) aims to convert music notation into digital formats. One approach to tackle OMR is through a multi-stage pipeline, where the system first detects visual music notation elements in the image (object detection) and then assembles them into a music notation (notation assembly). Most previous work on notation assembly unrealistically assumes perfect object detection. In this study, we focus on the MUSCIMA++ v2.0 dataset, which represents musical notation as a graph with pairwise relationships among detected music objects, and we consider both stages together. First, we introduce a music object detector based on YOLOv8, which improves detection performance. Second, we introduce a supervised training pipeline that completes the notation assembly stage based on detection output. We find that this model is able to outperform existing models trained on perfect detection output, showing the benefit of considering the detection and assembly stages in a more holistic way. These findings, together with our novel evaluation metric, are important steps toward a more complete OMR solution.
Accurate real-time object detection enhances the safety of advanced driver-assistance systems, making it an essential component in driving scenarios. With the rapid development of deep learning technology, CNN-based YOLO real-time object detectors have gained significant attention. However, the local focus of CNNs results in performance bottlenecks. To further enhance detector performance, researchers have introduced Transformer-based self-attention mechanisms to leverage global receptive fields, but their quadratic complexity incurs substantial computational costs. Recently, Mamba, with its linear complexity, has made significant progress through global selective scanning. Inspired by Mamba's outstanding performance, we propose a novel object detector: DS MYOLO. This detector captures global feature information through a simplified selective scanning fusion block (SimVSS Block) and effectively integrates the network's deep features. Additionally, we introduce an efficient channel attention convolution (ECAConv) that enhances cross-channel feature interaction while maintaining low computational complexity. Extensive experiments on the CCTSDB 2021 and VLD-45 driving scenarios datasets demonstrate that DS MYOLO exhibits significant potential and competitive advantage among similarly scaled YOLO series real-time object detectors.
Real-time object detection in indoor settings is a challenging area of computer vision, faced with unique obstacles such as variable lighting and complex backgrounds. This field holds significant potential to revolutionize applications like augmented and mixed realities by enabling more seamless interactions between digital content and the physical world. However, the scarcity of research specifically fitted to the intricacies of indoor environments has highlighted a clear gap in the literature. To address this, our study delves into the evaluation of existing datasets and computational models, leading to the creation of a refined dataset. This new dataset is derived from OpenImages v7, focusing exclusively on 32 indoor categories selected for their relevance to real-world applications. Alongside this, we present an adaptation of a CNN detection model, incorporating an attention mechanism to enhance the model's ability to discern and prioritize critical features within cluttered indoor scenes. Our findings demonstrate that this approach is not just competitive with existing state-of-the-art models in accuracy and speed but also opens new avenues for research and application in the field of real-time indoor object detection.
Apples growing in natural environments often face severe visual obstructions from leaves and branches. This significantly increases the risk of false detections in object detection tasks, thereby escalating the challenge. Addressing this issue, we introduce a technique called "Occlusion-Enhanced Distillation" (OED). This approach utilizes occlusion information to regularize the learning of semantically aligned features on occluded datasets and employs Exponential Moving Average (EMA) to enhance training stability. Specifically, we first design an occlusion-enhanced dataset that integrates Grounding DINO and SAM methods to extract occluding elements such as leaves and branches from each sample, creating occlusion examples that reflect the natural growth state of fruits. Additionally, we propose a multi-scale knowledge distillation strategy, where the student network uses images with increased occlusions as inputs, while the teacher network employs images without natural occlusions. Through this setup, the strategy guides the student network to learn from the teacher across scales of semantic and local features alignment, effectively narrowing the feature distance between occluded and non-occluded targets and enhancing the robustness of object detection. Lastly, to improve the stability of the student network, we introduce the EMA strategy, which aids the student network in learning more generalized feature expressions that are less affected by the noise of individual image occlusions. Our method significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art techniques through extensive comparative experiments.
While numerous methods achieving remarkable performance exist in the Object Detection literature, addressing data distribution shifts remains challenging. Continual Learning (CL) offers solutions to this issue, enabling models to adapt to new data while maintaining performance on previous data. This is particularly pertinent for edge devices, common in dynamic environments like automotive and robotics. In this work, we address the memory and computation constraints of edge devices in the Continual Learning for Object Detection (CLOD) scenario. Specifically, (i) we investigate the suitability of an open-source, lightweight, and fast detector, namely NanoDet, for CLOD on edge devices, improving upon larger architectures used in the literature. Moreover, (ii) we propose a novel CL method, called Latent Distillation~(LD), that reduces the number of operations and the memory required by state-of-the-art CL approaches without significantly compromising detection performance. Our approach is validated using the well-known VOC and COCO benchmarks, reducing the distillation parameter overhead by 74\% and the Floating Points Operations~(FLOPs) by 56\% per model update compared to other distillation methods.
We introduce Kvasir-VQA, an extended dataset derived from the HyperKvasir and Kvasir-Instrument datasets, augmented with question-and-answer annotations to facilitate advanced machine learning tasks in Gastrointestinal (GI) diagnostics. This dataset comprises 6,500 annotated images spanning various GI tract conditions and surgical instruments, and it supports multiple question types including yes/no, choice, location, and numerical count. The dataset is intended for applications such as image captioning, Visual Question Answering (VQA), text-based generation of synthetic medical images, object detection, and classification. Our experiments demonstrate the dataset's effectiveness in training models for three selected tasks, showcasing significant applications in medical image analysis and diagnostics. We also present evaluation metrics for each task, highlighting the usability and versatility of our dataset. The dataset and supporting artifacts are available at https://datasets.simula.no/kvasir-vqa.
With the increasing complexity of the traffic environment, the significance of safety perception in intelligent driving is intensifying. Traditional methods in the field of intelligent driving perception rely on deep learning, which suffers from limited interpretability, often described as a "black box." This paper introduces a novel type of loss function, termed "Entropy Loss," along with an innovative training strategy. Entropy Loss is formulated based on the functionality of feature compression networks within the perception model. Drawing inspiration from communication systems, the information transmission process in a feature compression network is expected to demonstrate steady changes in information volume and a continuous decrease in information entropy. By modeling network layer outputs as continuous random variables, we construct a probabilistic model that quantifies changes in information volume. Entropy Loss is then derived based on these expectations, guiding the update of network parameters to enhance network interpretability. Our experiments indicate that the Entropy Loss training strategy accelerates the training process. Utilizing the same 60 training epochs, the accuracy of 3D object detection models using Entropy Loss on the KITTI test set improved by up to 4.47\% compared to models without Entropy Loss, underscoring the method's efficacy. The implementation code is available at \url{https://github.com/yhbcode000/Eloss-Interpretability}.
In this paper, we assess the movement error of a targeting system given target location data from artificial intelligence (AI) methods in automatic target recognition (ATR) systems. Few studies evaluate the impacts on the accuracy in moving a targeting system to an aimpoint provided in this manner. To address this knowledge gap, we assess the performance of a controlled gun turret system given target location from an object detector developed from AI methods. In our assessment, we define a measure of object detector error and examine the correlations with several standard metrics in object detection. We then statistically analyze the object detector error data and turret movement error data acquired from controlled targeting simulations, as well as their aggregate error, to examine the impact on turret movement accuracy. Finally, we study the correlations between additional metrics and the probability of a hit. The results indicate that AI technologies are a significant source of error to targeting systems. Moreover, the results suggest that metrics such as the confidence score, intersection-over-union, average precision and average recall are predictors of accuracy against stationary targets with our system parameters.
Advancing Machine Learning (ML)-based perception models for autonomous systems necessitates addressing weak spots within the models, particularly in challenging Operational Design Domains (ODDs). These are environmental operating conditions of an autonomous vehicle which can contain difficult conditions, e.g., lens flare at night or objects reflected in a wet street. This report introduces a novel methodology for training with augmentations to enhance model robustness and performance in such conditions. The proposed approach leverages customized physics-based augmentation functions, to generate realistic training data that simulates diverse ODD scenarios. We present a comprehensive framework that includes identifying weak spots in ML models, selecting suitable augmentations, and devising effective training strategies. The methodology integrates hyperparameter optimization and latent space optimization to fine-tune augmentation parameters, ensuring they maximally improve the ML models' performance. Experimental results demonstrate improvements in model performance, as measured by commonly used metrics such as mean Average Precision (mAP) and mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) on open-source object detection and semantic segmentation models and datasets. Our findings emphasize that optimal training strategies are model- and data-specific and highlight the benefits of integrating augmentations into the training pipeline. By incorporating augmentations, we observe enhanced robustness of ML-based perception models, making them more resilient to edge cases encountered in real-world ODDs. This work underlines the importance of customized augmentations and offers an effective solution for improving the safety and reliability of autonomous driving functions.
For object detection detectors, enhancing model performance hinges on the ability to simultaneously consider inconsistencies across tasks and focus on difficult-to-train samples. Achieving this necessitates incorporating information from both the classification and regression tasks. However, prior work tends to either emphasize difficult-to-train samples within their respective tasks or simply compute classification scores with IoU, often leading to suboptimal model performance. In this paper, we propose a Hybrid Classification-Regression Adaptive Loss, termed as HCRAL. Specifically, we introduce the Residual of Classification and IoU (RCI) module for cross-task supervision, addressing task inconsistencies, and the Conditioning Factor (CF) to focus on difficult-to-train samples within each task. Furthermore, we introduce a new strategy named Expanded Adaptive Training Sample Selection (EATSS) to provide additional samples that exhibit classification and regression inconsistencies. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we conduct extensive experiments on COCO test-dev. Experimental evaluations demonstrate the superiority of our approachs. Additionally, we designed experiments by separately combining the classification and regression loss with regular loss functions in popular one-stage models, demonstrating improved performance.
The tracking-by-detection paradigm is the mainstream in multi-object tracking, associating tracks to the predictions of an object detector. Although exhibiting uncertainty through a confidence score, these predictions do not capture the entire variability of the inference process. For safety and security critical applications like autonomous driving, surveillance, etc., knowing this predictive uncertainty is essential though. Therefore, we introduce, for the first time, a fast way to obtain the empirical predictive distribution during object detection and incorporate that knowledge in multi-object tracking. Our mechanism can easily be integrated into state-of-the-art trackers, enabling them to fully exploit the uncertainty in the detections. Additionally, novel association methods are introduced that leverage the proposed mechanism. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our contribution on a variety of benchmarks, such as MOT17, MOT20, DanceTrack, and KITTI.
Recent Vision Mamba models not only have much lower complexity for processing higher resolution images and longer videos but also the competitive performance with Vision Transformers (ViTs). However, they are stuck into overfitting and thus only present up to base size (about 80M). It is still unclear how vanilla Vision Mamba (Vim) can be efficiently scaled up to larger sizes, which is essentially for further exploitation. In this paper, we propose a stochastic layer-wise shuffle regularization, which empowers successfully scaling non-hierarchical Vision Mamba to a large size (about 300M) in a supervised setting. Specifically, our base and large-scale ShuffleMamba models can outperform the supervised ViTs of similar size by 0.8\% and 1.0\% classification accuracy on ImageNet1k, respectively, without auxiliary data. When evaluated on the ADE20K semantic segmentation and COCO detection tasks, our ShuffleMamba models also show significant improvements. Without bells and whistles, the stochastic layer-wise shuffle has the following highlights: (1) \textit{Plug and play:} it does not change model architectures and will be omitted in inference. (2) \textit{Simple but effective:} it can improve the overfitting in Vim training and only introduce random token permutation operations. (3) \textit{Intuitive:} the token sequences in deeper layers are more likely to be shuffled as they are expected to be more semantic and less sensitive to patch positions. Code and models will be available at https://github.com/huangzizheng01/ShuffleMamba.
Few-shot point cloud 3D object detection (FS3D) aims to identify and localise objects of novel classes from point clouds, using knowledge learnt from annotated base classes and novel classes with very few annotations. Thus far, this challenging task has been approached using prototype learning, but the performance remains far from satisfactory. We find that in existing methods, the prototypes are only loosely constrained and lack of fine-grained awareness of the semantic and geometrical correlation embedded within the point cloud space. To mitigate these issues, we propose to leverage the inherent contrastive relationship within the semantic and geometrical subspaces to learn more refined and generalisable prototypical representations. To this end, we first introduce contrastive semantics mining, which enables the network to extract discriminative categorical features by constructing positive and negative pairs within training batches. Meanwhile, since point features representing local patterns can be clustered into geometric components, we further propose to impose contrastive relationship at the primitive level. Through refined primitive geometric structures, the transferability of feature encoding from base to novel classes is significantly enhanced. The above designs and insights lead to our novel Contrastive Prototypical VoteNet (CP-VoteNet). Extensive experiments on two FS3D benchmarks FS-ScanNet and FS-SUNRGBD demonstrate that CP-VoteNet surpasses current state-of-the-art methods by considerable margins across different FS3D settings. Further ablation studies conducted corroborate the rationale and effectiveness of our designs.
In recent years, 3D object perception has become a crucial component in the development of autonomous driving systems, providing essential environmental awareness. However, as perception tasks in autonomous driving evolve, their variants have increased, leading to diverse insights from industry and academia. Currently, there is a lack of comprehensive surveys that collect and summarize these perception tasks and their developments from a broader perspective. This review extensively summarizes traditional 3D object detection methods, focusing on camera-based, LiDAR-based, and fusion detection techniques. We provide a comprehensive analysis of the strengths and limitations of each approach, highlighting advancements in accuracy and robustness. Furthermore, we discuss future directions, including methods to improve accuracy such as temporal perception, occupancy grids, and end-to-end learning frameworks. We also explore cooperative perception methods that extend the perception range through collaborative communication. By providing a holistic view of the current state and future developments in 3D object perception, we aim to offer a more comprehensive understanding of perception tasks for autonomous driving. Additionally, we have established an active repository to provide continuous updates on the latest advancements in this field, accessible at: https://github.com/Fishsoup0/Autonomous-Driving-Perception.
Object detectors have shown outstanding performance on various public datasets. However, annotating a new dataset for a new task is usually unavoidable in real, since 1) a single existing dataset usually does not contain all object categories needed; 2) using multiple datasets usually suffers from annotation incompletion and heterogeneous features. We propose a novel problem as "Annotation-incomplete Multi-dataset Detection", and develop an end-to-end multi-task learning architecture which can accurately detect all the object categories with multiple partially annotated datasets. Specifically, we propose an attention feature extractor which helps to mine the relations among different datasets. Besides, a knowledge amalgamation training strategy is incorporated to accommodate heterogeneous features from different sources. Extensive experiments on different object detection datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods and an improvement of 2.17%, 2.10% in mAP can be achieved on COCO and VOC respectively.
Salient Object Detection (SOD) has traditionally relied on feature refinement modules that utilize the features of an ImageNet pre-trained backbone. However, this approach limits the possibility of pre-training the entire network because of the distinct nature of SOD and image classification. Additionally, the architecture of these backbones originally built for Image classification is sub-optimal for a dense prediction task like SOD. To address these issues, we propose a novel encoder-decoder-style neural network called SODAWideNet++ that is designed explicitly for SOD. Inspired by the vision transformers ability to attain a global receptive field from the initial stages, we introduce the Attention Guided Long Range Feature Extraction (AGLRFE) module, which combines large dilated convolutions and self-attention. Specifically, we use attention features to guide long-range information extracted by multiple dilated convolutions, thus taking advantage of the inductive biases of a convolution operation and the input dependency brought by self-attention. In contrast to the current paradigm of ImageNet pre-training, we modify 118K annotated images from the COCO semantic segmentation dataset by binarizing the annotations to pre-train the proposed model end-to-end. Further, we supervise the background predictions along with the foreground to push our model to generate accurate saliency predictions. SODAWideNet++ performs competitively on five different datasets while only containing 35% of the trainable parameters compared to the state-of-the-art models. The code and pre-computed saliency maps are provided at https://github.com/VimsLab/SODAWideNetPlusPlus.