Contemporary face detection algorithms have to deal with many challenges such as variations in pose, illumination, and scale. A subclass of the face detection problem that has recently gained increasing attention is occluded face detection, or more specifically, the detection of masked faces. Three years on since the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is still a complete lack of evidence regarding how well existing face detection algorithms perform on masked faces. This article first offers a brief review of state-of-the-art face detectors and detectors made for the masked face problem, along with a review of the existing masked face datasets. We evaluate and compare the performances of a well-representative set of face detectors at masked face detection and conclude with a discussion on the possible contributing factors to their performance.
One of the key problems in 3D object detection is to reduce the accuracy gap between methods based on LiDAR sensors and those based on monocular cameras. A recently proposed framework for monocular 3D detection based on Pseudo-Stereo has received considerable attention in the community. However, so far these two problems are discovered in existing practices, including (1) monocular depth estimation and Pseudo-Stereo detector must be trained separately, (2) Difficult to be compatible with different stereo detectors and (3) the overall calculation is large, which affects the reasoning speed. In this work, we propose an end-to-end, efficient pseudo-stereo 3D detection framework by introducing a Single-View Diffusion Model (SVDM) that uses a few iterations to gradually deliver right informative pixels to the left image. SVDM allows the entire pseudo-stereo 3D detection pipeline to be trained end-to-end and can benefit from the training of stereo detectors. Afterwards, we further explore the application of SVDM in depth-free stereo 3D detection, and the final framework is compatible with most stereo detectors. Among multiple benchmarks on the KITTI dataset, we achieve new state-of-the-art performance.
Nowadays, there is a wide availability of datasets that enable the training of common object detectors or human detectors. These come in the form of labelled real-world images and require either a significant amount of human effort, with a high probability of errors such as missing labels, or very constrained scenarios, e.g. VICON systems. On the other hand, uncommon scenarios, like aerial views, animals, like wild zebras, or difficult-to-obtain information, such as human shapes, are hardly available. To overcome this, synthetic data generation with realistic rendering technologies has recently gained traction and advanced research areas such as target tracking and human pose estimation. However, subjects such as wild animals are still usually not well represented in such datasets. In this work, we first show that a pre-trained YOLO detector can not identify zebras in real images recorded from aerial viewpoints. To solve this, we present an approach for training an animal detector using only synthetic data. We start by generating a novel synthetic zebra dataset using GRADE, a state-of-the-art framework for data generation. The dataset includes RGB, depth, skeletal joint locations, pose, shape and instance segmentations for each subject. We use this to train a YOLO detector from scratch. Through extensive evaluations of our model with real-world data from i) limited datasets available on the internet and ii) a new one collected and manually labelled by us, we show that we can detect zebras by using only synthetic data during training. The code, results, trained models, and both the generated and training data are provided as open-source at //eliabntt.github.io/grade-rr.
Object detection in 3D is a crucial aspect in the context of autonomous vehicles and drones. However, prototyping detection algorithms is time-consuming and costly in terms of energy and environmental impact. To address these challenges, one can check the effectiveness of different models by training on a subset of the original training set. In this paper, we present a comparison of three algorithms for selecting such a subset - random sampling, random per class sampling, and our proposed MONSPeC (Maximum Object Number Sampling per Class). We provide empirical evidence for the superior effectiveness of random per class sampling and MONSPeC over basic random sampling. By replacing random sampling with one of the more efficient algorithms, the results obtained on the subset are more likely to transfer to the results on the entire dataset. The code is available at: //github.com/vision-agh/monspec.
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is critical to ensuring the reliability and safety of machine learning systems. For instance, in autonomous driving, we would like the driving system to issue an alert and hand over the control to humans when it detects unusual scenes or objects that it has never seen before and cannot make a safe decision. This problem first emerged in 2017 and since then has received increasing attention from the research community, leading to a plethora of methods developed, ranging from classification-based to density-based to distance-based ones. Meanwhile, several other problems are closely related to OOD detection in terms of motivation and methodology. These include anomaly detection (AD), novelty detection (ND), open set recognition (OSR), and outlier detection (OD). Despite having different definitions and problem settings, these problems often confuse readers and practitioners, and as a result, some existing studies misuse terms. In this survey, we first present a generic framework called generalized OOD detection, which encompasses the five aforementioned problems, i.e., AD, ND, OSR, OOD detection, and OD. Under our framework, these five problems can be seen as special cases or sub-tasks, and are easier to distinguish. Then, we conduct a thorough review of each of the five areas by summarizing their recent technical developments. We conclude this survey with open challenges and potential research directions.
Autonomous driving is regarded as one of the most promising remedies to shield human beings from severe crashes. To this end, 3D object detection serves as the core basis of such perception system especially for the sake of path planning, motion prediction, collision avoidance, etc. Generally, stereo or monocular images with corresponding 3D point clouds are already standard layout for 3D object detection, out of which point clouds are increasingly prevalent with accurate depth information being provided. Despite existing efforts, 3D object detection on point clouds is still in its infancy due to high sparseness and irregularity of point clouds by nature, misalignment view between camera view and LiDAR bird's eye of view for modality synergies, occlusions and scale variations at long distances, etc. Recently, profound progress has been made in 3D object detection, with a large body of literature being investigated to address this vision task. As such, we present a comprehensive review of the latest progress in this field covering all the main topics including sensors, fundamentals, and the recent state-of-the-art detection methods with their pros and cons. Furthermore, we introduce metrics and provide quantitative comparisons on popular public datasets. The avenues for future work are going to be judiciously identified after an in-deep analysis of the surveyed works. Finally, we conclude this paper.
Weakly-Supervised Object Detection (WSOD) and Localization (WSOL), i.e., detecting multiple and single instances with bounding boxes in an image using image-level labels, are long-standing and challenging tasks in the CV community. With the success of deep neural networks in object detection, both WSOD and WSOL have received unprecedented attention. Hundreds of WSOD and WSOL methods and numerous techniques have been proposed in the deep learning era. To this end, in this paper, we consider WSOL is a sub-task of WSOD and provide a comprehensive survey of the recent achievements of WSOD. Specifically, we firstly describe the formulation and setting of the WSOD, including the background, challenges, basic framework. Meanwhile, we summarize and analyze all advanced techniques and training tricks for improving detection performance. Then, we introduce the widely-used datasets and evaluation metrics of WSOD. Lastly, we discuss the future directions of WSOD. We believe that these summaries can help pave a way for future research on WSOD and WSOL.
The considerable significance of Anomaly Detection (AD) problem has recently drawn the attention of many researchers. Consequently, the number of proposed methods in this research field has been increased steadily. AD strongly correlates with the important computer vision and image processing tasks such as image/video anomaly, irregularity and sudden event detection. More recently, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) offer a high performance set of solutions, but at the expense of a heavy computational cost. However, there is a noticeable gap between the previously proposed methods and an applicable real-word approach. Regarding the raised concerns about AD as an ongoing challenging problem, notably in images and videos, the time has come to argue over the pitfalls and prospects of methods have attempted to deal with visual AD tasks. Hereupon, in this survey we intend to conduct an in-depth investigation into the images/videos deep learning based AD methods. We also discuss current challenges and future research directions thoroughly.
Detection and recognition of text in natural images are two main problems in the field of computer vision that have a wide variety of applications in analysis of sports videos, autonomous driving, industrial automation, to name a few. They face common challenging problems that are factors in how text is represented and affected by several environmental conditions. The current state-of-the-art scene text detection and/or recognition methods have exploited the witnessed advancement in deep learning architectures and reported a superior accuracy on benchmark datasets when tackling multi-resolution and multi-oriented text. However, there are still several remaining challenges affecting text in the wild images that cause existing methods to underperform due to there models are not able to generalize to unseen data and the insufficient labeled data. Thus, unlike previous surveys in this field, the objectives of this survey are as follows: first, offering the reader not only a review on the recent advancement in scene text detection and recognition, but also presenting the results of conducting extensive experiments using a unified evaluation framework that assesses pre-trained models of the selected methods on challenging cases, and applies the same evaluation criteria on these techniques. Second, identifying several existing challenges for detecting or recognizing text in the wild images, namely, in-plane-rotation, multi-oriented and multi-resolution text, perspective distortion, illumination reflection, partial occlusion, complex fonts, and special characters. Finally, the paper also presents insight into the potential research directions in this field to address some of the mentioned challenges that are still encountering scene text detection and recognition techniques.
In recent years, object detection has experienced impressive progress. Despite these improvements, there is still a significant gap in the performance between the detection of small and large objects. We analyze the current state-of-the-art model, Mask-RCNN, on a challenging dataset, MS COCO. We show that the overlap between small ground-truth objects and the predicted anchors is much lower than the expected IoU threshold. We conjecture this is due to two factors; (1) only a few images are containing small objects, and (2) small objects do not appear enough even within each image containing them. We thus propose to oversample those images with small objects and augment each of those images by copy-pasting small objects many times. It allows us to trade off the quality of the detector on large objects with that on small objects. We evaluate different pasting augmentation strategies, and ultimately, we achieve 9.7\% relative improvement on the instance segmentation and 7.1\% on the object detection of small objects, compared to the current state of the art method on MS COCO.
Generic object detection, aiming at locating object instances from a large number of predefined categories in natural images, is one of the most fundamental and challenging problems in computer vision. Deep learning techniques have emerged in recent years as powerful methods for learning feature representations directly from data, and have led to remarkable breakthroughs in the field of generic object detection. Given this time of rapid evolution, the goal of this paper is to provide a comprehensive survey of the recent achievements in this field brought by deep learning techniques. More than 250 key contributions are included in this survey, covering many aspects of generic object detection research: leading detection frameworks and fundamental subproblems including object feature representation, object proposal generation, context information modeling and training strategies; evaluation issues, specifically benchmark datasets, evaluation metrics, and state of the art performance. We finish by identifying promising directions for future research.