Effective object detection in autonomous vehicles is challenged by deployment in diverse and unfamiliar environments. Online Source-Free Domain Adaptation (O-SFDA) offers model adaptation using a stream of unlabeled data from a target domain in an online manner. However, not all captured frames contain information beneficial for adaptation, especially in the presence of redundant data and class imbalance issues. This paper introduces a novel approach to enhance O-SFDA for adaptive object detection through unsupervised data acquisition. Our methodology prioritizes the most informative unlabeled frames for inclusion in the online training process. Empirical evaluation on a real-world dataset reveals that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art O-SFDA techniques, demonstrating the viability of unsupervised data acquisition for improving the adaptive object detector.
Multimodal image fusion and object detection are crucial for autonomous driving. While current methods have advanced the fusion of texture details and semantic information, their complex training processes hinder broader applications. Addressing this challenge, we introduce E2E-MFD, a novel end-to-end algorithm for multimodal fusion detection. E2E-MFD streamlines the process, achieving high performance with a single training phase. It employs synchronous joint optimization across components to avoid suboptimal solutions tied to individual tasks. Furthermore, it implements a comprehensive optimization strategy in the gradient matrix for shared parameters, ensuring convergence to an optimal fusion detection configuration. Our extensive testing on multiple public datasets reveals E2E-MFD's superior capabilities, showcasing not only visually appealing image fusion but also impressive detection outcomes, such as a 3.9% and 2.0% mAP50 increase on horizontal object detection dataset M3FD and oriented object detection dataset DroneVehicle, respectively, compared to state-of-the-art approaches. The code is released at https://github.com/icey-zhang/E2E-MFD.
Image restoration algorithms such as super resolution (SR) are indispensable pre-processing modules for object detection in degraded images. However, most of these algorithms assume the degradation is fixed and known a priori. When the real degradation is unknown or differs from assumption, both the pre-processing module and the consequent high-level task such as object detection would fail. Here, we propose a novel framework, RestoreDet, to detect objects in degraded low resolution images. RestoreDet utilizes the downsampling degradation as a kind of transformation for self-supervised signals to explore the equivariant representation against various resolutions and other degradation conditions. Specifically, we learn this intrinsic visual structure by encoding and decoding the degradation transformation from a pair of original and randomly degraded images. The framework could further take the advantage of advanced SR architectures with an arbitrary resolution restoring decoder to reconstruct the original correspondence from the degraded input image. Both the representation learning and object detection are optimized jointly in an end-to-end training fashion. RestoreDet is a generic framework that could be implemented on any mainstream object detection architectures. The extensive experiment shows that our framework based on CenterNet has achieved superior performance compared with existing methods when facing variant degradation situations. Our code would be released soon.
We propose an embarrassingly simple method -- instance-aware repeat factor sampling (IRFS) to address the problem of imbalanced data in long-tailed object detection. Imbalanced datasets in real-world object detection often suffer from a large disparity in the number of instances for each class. To improve the generalization performance of object detection models on rare classes, various data sampling techniques have been proposed. Repeat factor sampling (RFS) has shown promise due to its simplicity and effectiveness. Despite its efficiency, RFS completely neglects the instance counts and solely relies on the image count during re-sampling process. However, instance count may immensely vary for different classes with similar image counts. Such variation highlights the importance of both image and instance for addressing the long-tail distributions. Thus, we propose IRFS which unifies instance and image counts for the re-sampling process to be aware of different perspectives of the imbalance in long-tailed datasets. Our method shows promising results on the challenging LVIS v1.0 benchmark dataset over various architectures and backbones, demonstrating their effectiveness in improving the performance of object detection models on rare classes with a relative $+50\%$ average precision (AP) improvement over counterpart RFS. IRFS can serve as a strong baseline and be easily incorporated into existing long-tailed frameworks.
Detecting oriented tiny objects, which are limited in appearance information yet prevalent in real-world applications, remains an intricate and under-explored problem. To address this, we systemically introduce a new dataset, benchmark, and a dynamic coarse-to-fine learning scheme in this study. Our proposed dataset, AI-TOD-R, features the smallest object sizes among all oriented object detection datasets. Based on AI-TOD-R, we present a benchmark spanning a broad range of detection paradigms, including both fully-supervised and label-efficient approaches. Through investigation, we identify a learning bias presents across various learning pipelines: confident objects become increasingly confident, while vulnerable oriented tiny objects are further marginalized, hindering their detection performance. To mitigate this issue, we propose a Dynamic Coarse-to-Fine Learning (DCFL) scheme to achieve unbiased learning. DCFL dynamically updates prior positions to better align with the limited areas of oriented tiny objects, and it assigns samples in a way that balances both quantity and quality across different object shapes, thus mitigating biases in prior settings and sample selection. Extensive experiments across eight challenging object detection datasets demonstrate that DCFL achieves state-of-the-art accuracy, high efficiency, and remarkable versatility. The dataset, benchmark, and code are available at https://chasel-tsui.github.io/AI-TOD-R/.
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) lag behind Large Language Models due to the scarcity of annotated datasets, as creating paired visual-textual annotations is labor-intensive and expensive. To address this bottleneck, we introduce SAM2Auto, the first fully automated annotation pipeline for video datasets requiring no human intervention or dataset-specific training. Our approach consists of two key components: SMART-OD, a robust object detection system that combines automatic mask generation with open-world object detection capabilities, and FLASH (Frame-Level Annotation and Segmentation Handler), a multi-object real-time video instance segmentation (VIS) that maintains consistent object identification across video frames even with intermittent detection gaps. Unlike existing open-world detection methods that require frame-specific hyperparameter tuning and suffer from numerous false positives, our system employs statistical approaches to minimize detection errors while ensuring consistent object tracking throughout entire video sequences. Extensive experimental validation demonstrates that SAM2Auto achieves comparable accuracy to manual annotation while dramatically reducing annotation time and eliminating labor costs. The system successfully handles diverse datasets without requiring retraining or extensive parameter adjustments, making it a practical solution for large-scale dataset creation. Our work establishes a new baseline for automated video annotation and provides a pathway for accelerating VLM development by addressing the fundamental dataset bottleneck that has constrained progress in vision-language understanding.
The use of random perturbations of ground truth data, such as random translation or scaling of bounding boxes, is a common heuristic used for data augmentation that has been shown to prevent overfitting and improve generalization. Since the design of data augmentation is largely guided by reported best practices, it is difficult to understand if those design choices are optimal. To provide a more principled perspective, we develop a game-theoretic interpretation of data augmentation in the context of object detection. We aim to find an optimal adversarial perturbations of the ground truth data (i.e., the worst case perturbations) that forces the object bounding box predictor to learn from the hardest distribution of perturbed examples for better test-time performance. We establish that the game theoretic solution, the Nash equilibrium, provides both an optimal predictor and optimal data augmentation distribution. We show that our adversarial method of training a predictor can significantly improve test time performance for the task of object detection. On the ImageNet object detection task, our adversarial approach improves performance by over 16\% compared to the best performing data augmentation method
Marine object detection has gained prominence in marine research, driven by the pressing need to unravel oceanic mysteries and enhance our understanding of invaluable marine ecosystems. There is a profound requirement to efficiently and accurately identify and localize diverse and unseen marine entities within underwater imagery. The open-marine object detection (OMOD for short) is required to detect diverse and unseen marine objects, performing categorization and localization simultaneously. To achieve OMOD, we present \textbf{MarineDet}. We formulate a joint visual-text semantic space through pre-training and then perform marine-specific training to achieve in-air-to-marine knowledge transfer. Considering there is no specific dataset designed for OMOD, we construct a \textbf{MarineDet dataset} consisting of 821 marine-relative object categories to promote and measure OMOD performance. The experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of MarineDet over existing generalist and specialist object detection algorithms. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to present OMOD, which holds a more valuable and practical setting for marine ecosystem monitoring and management. Our research not only pushes the boundaries of marine understanding but also offers a standard pipeline for OMOD.
Deep neural networks have been demonstrated to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks: subtle perturbation can completely change prediction result. The vulnerability has led to a surge of research in this direction, including adversarial attacks on object detection networks. However, previous studies are dedicated to attacking anchor-based object detectors. In this paper, we present the first adversarial attack on anchor-free object detectors. It conducts category-wise, instead of previously instance-wise, attacks on object detectors, and leverages high-level semantic information to efficiently generate transferable adversarial examples, which can also be transferred to attack other object detectors, even anchor-based detectors such as Faster R-CNN. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance and transferability.
While expensive LiDAR and stereo camera rigs have enabled the development of successful 3D object detection methods, monocular RGB-only approaches lag much behind. This work advances the state of the art by introducing MoVi-3D, a novel, single-stage deep architecture for monocular 3D object detection. MoVi-3D builds upon a novel approach which leverages geometrical information to generate, both at training and test time, virtual views where the object appearance is normalized with respect to distance. These virtually generated views facilitate the detection task as they significantly reduce the visual appearance variability associated to objects placed at different distances from the camera. As a consequence, the deep model is relieved from learning depth-specific representations and its complexity can be significantly reduced. In particular, in this work we show that, thanks to our virtual views generation process, a lightweight, single-stage architecture suffices to set new state-of-the-art results on the popular KITTI3D benchmark.
The small objects in images and videos are usually not independent individuals. Instead, they more or less present some semantic and spatial layout relationships with each other. Modeling and inferring such intrinsic relationships can thereby be beneficial for small object detection. In this paper, we propose a novel context reasoning approach for small object detection which models and infers the intrinsic semantic and spatial layout relationships between objects. Specifically, we first construct a semantic module to model the sparse semantic relationships based on the initial regional features, and a spatial layout module to model the sparse spatial layout relationships based on their position and shape information, respectively. Both of them are then fed into a context reasoning module for integrating the contextual information with respect to the objects and their relationships, which is further fused with the original regional visual features for classification and regression. Experimental results reveal that the proposed approach can effectively boost the small object detection performance.
In training object detector based on convolutional neural networks, selection of effective positive examples for training is an important factor. However, when training an anchor-based detectors with sparse annotations on an image, effort to find effective positive examples can hinder training performance. When using the anchor-based training for the ground truth bounding box to collect positive examples under given IoU, it is often possible to include objects from other classes in the current training class, or objects that are needed to be trained can only be sampled as negative examples. We used two approaches to solve this problem: 1) the use of an anchorless object detector and 2) a semi-supervised learning-based object detection using a single object tracker. The proposed technique performs single object tracking by using the sparsely annotated bounding box as an anchor in the temporal domain for successive frames. From the tracking results, dense annotations for training images were generated in an automated manner and used for training the object detector. We applied the proposed single object tracking-based semi-supervised learning to the Epic-Kitchens dataset. As a result, we were able to achieve \textbf{runner-up} performance in the Unseen section while achieving the first place in the Seen section of the Epic-Kitchens 2020 object detection challenge under IoU > 0.5 evaluation
Most object detectors contain two important components: a feature extractor and an object classifier. The feature extractor has rapidly evolved with significant research efforts leading to better deep convolutional architectures. The object classifier, however, has not received much attention and many recent systems (like SPPnet and Fast/Faster R-CNN) use simple multi-layer perceptrons. This paper demonstrates that carefully designing deep networks for object classification is just as important. We experiment with region-wise classifier networks that use shared, region-independent convolutional features. We call them "Networks on Convolutional feature maps" (NoCs). We discover that aside from deep feature maps, a deep and convolutional per-region classifier is of particular importance for object detection, whereas latest superior image classification models (such as ResNets and GoogLeNets) do not directly lead to good detection accuracy without using such a per-region classifier. We show by experiments that despite the effective ResNets and Faster R-CNN systems, the design of NoCs is an essential element for the 1st-place winning entries in ImageNet and MS COCO challenges 2015.
Visual anomaly detection is vital in real-world applications, such as industrial defect detection and medical diagnosis. However, most existing methods focus on local structural anomalies and fail to detect higher-level functional anomalies under logical conditions. Although recent studies have explored logical anomaly detection, they can only address simple anomalies like missing or addition and show poor generalizability due to being heavily data-driven. To fill this gap, we propose SAM-LAD, a zero-shot, plug-and-play framework for logical anomaly detection in any scene. First, we obtain a query image's feature map using a pre-trained backbone. Simultaneously, we retrieve the reference images and their corresponding feature maps via the nearest neighbor search of the query image. Then, we introduce the Segment Anything Model (SAM) to obtain object masks of the query and reference images. Each object mask is multiplied with the entire image's feature map to obtain object feature maps. Next, an Object Matching Model (OMM) is proposed to match objects in the query and reference images. To facilitate object matching, we further propose a Dynamic Channel Graph Attention (DCGA) module, treating each object as a keypoint and converting its feature maps into feature vectors. Finally, based on the object matching relations, an Anomaly Measurement Model (AMM) is proposed to detect objects with logical anomalies. Structural anomalies in the objects can also be detected. We validate our proposed SAM-LAD using various benchmarks, including industrial datasets (MVTec Loco AD, MVTec AD), and the logical dataset (DigitAnatomy). Extensive experimental results demonstrate that SAM-LAD outperforms existing SoTA methods, particularly in detecting logical anomalies.
As Super-Resolution (SR) has matured as a research topic, it has been applied to additional topics beyond image reconstruction. In particular, combining classification or object detection tasks with a super-resolution preprocessing stage has yielded improvements in accuracy especially with objects that are small relative to the scene. While SR has shown promise, a study comparing SR and naive upscaling methods such as Nearest Neighbors (NN) interpolation when applied as a preprocessing step for object detection has not been performed. We apply the topic to satellite data and compare the Multi-scale Deep Super-Resolution (MDSR) system to NN on the xView challenge dataset. To do so, we propose a pipeline for processing satellite data that combines multi-stage image tiling and upscaling, the YOLOv2 object detection architecture, and label stitching. We compare the effects of training models using an upscaling factor of 4, upscaling images from 30cm Ground Sample Distance (GSD) to an effective GSD of 7.5cm. Upscaling by this factor significantly improves detection results, increasing Average Precision (AP) of a generalized vehicle class by 23 percent. We demonstrate that while SR produces upscaled images that are more visually pleasing than their NN counterparts, object detection networks see little difference in accuracy with images upsampled using NN obtaining nearly identical results to the MDSRx4 enhanced images with a difference of 0.0002 AP between the two methods.
Traditional object detection models are constrained by the limitations of closed-set datasets, detecting only categories encountered during training. While multimodal models have extended category recognition by aligning text and image modalities, they introduce significant inference overhead due to cross-modality fusion and still remain restricted by predefined vocabulary, leaving them ineffective at handling unknown objects in open-world scenarios. In this work, we introduce Universal Open-World Object Detection (Uni-OWD), a new paradigm that unifies open-vocabulary and open-world object detection tasks. To address the challenges of this setting, we propose YOLO-UniOW, a novel model that advances the boundaries of efficiency, versatility, and performance. YOLO-UniOW incorporates Adaptive Decision Learning to replace computationally expensive cross-modality fusion with lightweight alignment in the CLIP latent space, achieving efficient detection without compromising generalization. Additionally, we design a Wildcard Learning strategy that detects out-of-distribution objects as "unknown" while enabling dynamic vocabulary expansion without the need for incremental learning. This design empowers YOLO-UniOW to seamlessly adapt to new categories in open-world environments. Extensive experiments validate the superiority of YOLO-UniOW, achieving achieving 34.6 AP and 30.0 APr on LVIS with an inference speed of 69.6 FPS. The model also sets benchmarks on M-OWODB, S-OWODB, and nuScenes datasets, showcasing its unmatched performance in open-world object detection. Code and models are available at https://github.com/THU-MIG/YOLO-UniOW.
The quality and size of training sets often limit the performance of many state of the art object detectors. However, in many scenarios, it can be difficult to collect images for training, not to mention the costs associated with collecting annotations suitable for training these object detectors. For these reasons, on challenging video datasets such as the Dataset for Underwater Substrate and Invertebrate Analysis (DUSIA), budgets may only allow for collecting and providing partial annotations. To aid in the challenges associated with training with limited and partial annotations, we introduce Context Matched Collages, which leverage explicit context labels to combine unused background examples with existing annotated data to synthesize additional training samples that ultimately improve object detection performance. By combining a set of our generated collage images with the original training set, we see improved performance using three different object detectors on DUSIA, ultimately achieving state of the art object detection performance on the dataset.
We present a simple and flexible object detection framework optimized for autonomous driving. Building on the observation that point clouds in this application are extremely sparse, we propose a practical pillar-based approach to fix the imbalance issue caused by anchors. In particular, our algorithm incorporates a cylindrical projection into multi-view feature learning, predicts bounding box parameters per pillar rather than per point or per anchor, and includes an aligned pillar-to-point projection module to improve the final prediction. Our anchor-free approach avoids hyperparameter search associated with past methods, simplifying 3D object detection while significantly improving upon state-of-the-art.
This study conducts a detailed comparison of RF-DETR object detection base model and YOLOv12 object detection model configurations for detecting greenfruits in a complex orchard environment marked by label ambiguity, occlusions, and background blending. A custom dataset was developed featuring both single-class (greenfruit) and multi-class (occluded and non-occluded greenfruits) annotations to assess model performance under dynamic real-world conditions. RF-DETR object detection model, utilizing a DINOv2 backbone and deformable attention, excelled in global context modeling, effectively identifying partially occluded or ambiguous greenfruits. In contrast, YOLOv12 leveraged CNN-based attention for enhanced local feature extraction, optimizing it for computational efficiency and edge deployment. RF-DETR achieved the highest mean Average Precision (mAP50) of 0.9464 in single-class detection, proving its superior ability to localize greenfruits in cluttered scenes. Although YOLOv12N recorded the highest mAP@50:95 of 0.7620, RF-DETR consistently outperformed in complex spatial scenarios. For multi-class detection, RF-DETR led with an mAP@50 of 0.8298, showing its capability to differentiate between occluded and non-occluded fruits, while YOLOv12L scored highest in mAP@50:95 with 0.6622, indicating better classification in detailed occlusion contexts. Training dynamics analysis highlighted RF-DETR's swift convergence, particularly in single-class settings where it plateaued within 10 epochs, demonstrating the efficiency of transformer-based architectures in adapting to dynamic visual data. These findings validate RF-DETR's effectiveness for precision agricultural applications, with YOLOv12 suited for fast-response scenarios. >Index Terms: RF-DETR object detection, YOLOv12, YOLOv13, YOLOv14, YOLOv15, YOLOE, YOLO World, YOLO, You Only Look Once, Roboflow, Detection Transformers, CNNs
Object detection networks are powerful in computer vision, but not necessarily optimized for biomedical object detection. In this work, we propose CircleNet, a simple anchor-free detection method with circle representation for detection of the ball-shaped glomerulus. Different from the traditional bounding box based detection method, the bounding circle (1) reduces the degrees of freedom of detection representation, (2) is naturally rotation invariant, (3) and optimized for ball-shaped objects. The key innovation to enable this representation is the anchor-free framework with the circle detection head. We evaluate CircleNet in the context of detection of glomerulus. CircleNet increases average precision of the glomerulus detection from 0.598 to 0.647. Another key advantage is that CircleNet achieves better rotation consistency compared with bounding box representations.