Object Detection in 20 Years: A Survey

Object detection, as of one the most fundamental and challenging problems in computer vision, has received great attention in recent years. Its development in the past two decades can be regarded as an epitome of computer vision history. If we think of today's object detection as a technical aesthetics under the power of deep learning, then turning back the clock 20 years we would witness the wisdom of cold weapon era. This paper extensively reviews 400+ papers of object detection in the light of its technical evolution, spanning over a quarter-century's time (from the 1990s to 2019). A number of topics have been covered in this paper, including the milestone detectors in history, detection datasets, metrics, fundamental building blocks of the detection system, speed up techniques, and the recent state of the art detection methods. This paper also reviews some important detection applications, such as pedestrian detection, face detection, text detection, etc, and makes an in-deep analysis of their challenges as well as technical improvements in recent years.Comment: This work has been submitted to the IEEE TPAMI for possible publicatio

SINet: A Scale-insensitive Convolutional Neural Network for Fast Vehicle Detection

Vision-based vehicle detection approaches achieve incredible success in recent years with the development of deep convolutional neural network (CNN). However, existing CNN based algorithms suffer from the problem that the convolutional features are scale-sensitive in object detection task but it is common that traffic images and videos contain vehicles with a large variance of scales. In this paper, we delve into the source of scale sensitivity, and reveal two key issues: 1) existing RoI pooling destroys the structure of small scale objects, 2) the large intra-class distance for a large variance of scales exceeds the representation capability of a single network. Based on these findings, we present a scale-insensitive convolutional neural network (SINet) for fast detecting vehicles with a large variance of scales. First, we present a context-aware RoI pooling to maintain the contextual information and original structure of small scale objects. Second, we present a multi-branch decision network to minimize the intra-class distance of features. These lightweight techniques bring zero extra time complexity but prominent detection accuracy improvement. The proposed techniques can be equipped with any deep network architectures and keep them trained end-to-end. Our SINet achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of accuracy and speed (up to 37 FPS) on the KITTI benchmark and a new highway dataset, which contains a large variance of scales and extremely small objects.Comment: Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems (T-ITS

Perceptual Generative Adversarial Networks for Small Object Detection

Detecting small objects is notoriously challenging due to their low resolution and noisy representation. Existing object detection pipelines usually detect small objects through learning representations of all the objects at multiple scales. However, the performance gain of such ad hoc architectures is usually limited to pay off the computational cost. In this work, we address the small object detection problem by developing a single architecture that internally lifts representations of small objects to "super-resolved" ones, achieving similar characteristics as large objects and thus more discriminative for detection. For this purpose, we propose a new Perceptual Generative Adversarial Network (Perceptual GAN) model that improves small object detection through narrowing representation difference of small objects from the large ones. Specifically, its generator learns to transfer perceived poor representations of the small objects to super-resolved ones that are similar enough to real large objects to fool a competing discriminator. Meanwhile its discriminator competes with the generator to identify the generated representation and imposes an additional perceptual requirement - generated representations of small objects must be beneficial for detection purpose - on the generator. Extensive evaluations on the challenging Tsinghua-Tencent 100K and the Caltech benchmark well demonstrate the superiority of Perceptual GAN in detecting small objects, including traffic signs and pedestrians, over well-established state-of-the-arts

Detecting the Unexpected via Image Resynthesis

Classical semantic segmentation methods, including the recent deep learning ones, assume that all classes observed at test time have been seen during training. In this paper, we tackle the more realistic scenario where unexpected objects of unknown classes can appear at test time. The main trends in this area either leverage the notion of prediction uncertainty to flag the regions with low confidence as unknown, or rely on autoencoders and highlight poorly-decoded regions. Having observed that, in both cases, the detected regions typically do not correspond to unexpected objects, in this paper, we introduce a drastically different strategy: It relies on the intuition that the network will produce spurious labels in regions depicting unexpected objects. Therefore, resynthesizing the image from the resulting semantic map will yield significant appearance differences with respect to the input image. In other words, we translate the problem of detecting unknown classes to one of identifying poorly-resynthesized image regions. We show that this outperforms both uncertainty- and autoencoder-based methods

Physical Adversarial Attack meets Computer Vision: A Decade Survey

Although Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have achieved impressive results in computer vision, their exposed vulnerability to adversarial attacks remains a serious concern. A series of works has shown that by adding elaborate perturbations to images, DNNs could have catastrophic degradation in performance metrics. And this phenomenon does not only exist in the digital space but also in the physical space. Therefore, estimating the security of these DNNs-based systems is critical for safely deploying them in the real world, especially for security-critical applications, e.g., autonomous cars, video surveillance, and medical diagnosis. In this paper, we focus on physical adversarial attacks and provide a comprehensive survey of over 150 existing papers. We first clarify the concept of the physical adversarial attack and analyze its characteristics. Then, we define the adversarial medium, essential to perform attacks in the physical world. Next, we present the physical adversarial attack methods in task order: classification, detection, and re-identification, and introduce their performance in solving the trilemma: effectiveness, stealthiness, and robustness. In the end, we discuss the current challenges and potential future directions.Comment: 32 pages. Under Revie