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Oct 30

YOLO-MS: Rethinking Multi-Scale Representation Learning for Real-time Object Detection

We aim at providing the object detection community with an efficient and performant object detector, termed YOLO-MS. The core design is based on a series of investigations on how multi-branch features of the basic block and convolutions with different kernel sizes affect the detection performance of objects at different scales. The outcome is a new strategy that can significantly enhance multi-scale feature representations of real-time object detectors. To verify the effectiveness of our work, we train our YOLO-MS on the MS COCO dataset from scratch without relying on any other large-scale datasets, like ImageNet or pre-trained weights. Without bells and whistles, our YOLO-MS outperforms the recent state-of-the-art real-time object detectors, including YOLO-v7, RTMDet, and YOLO-v8. Taking the XS version of YOLO-MS as an example, it can achieve an AP score of 42+% on MS COCO, which is about 2% higher than RTMDet with the same model size. Furthermore, our work can also serve as a plug-and-play module for other YOLO models. Typically, our method significantly advances the APs, APl, and AP of YOLOv8-N from 18%+, 52%+, and 37%+ to 20%+, 55%+, and 40%+, respectively, with even fewer parameters and MACs. Code and trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/FishAndWasabi/YOLO-MS. We also provide the Jittor version at https://github.com/NK-JittorCV/nk-yolo.

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 10, 2023

D-FINE: Redefine Regression Task in DETRs as Fine-grained Distribution Refinement

We introduce D-FINE, a powerful real-time object detector that achieves outstanding localization precision by redefining the bounding box regression task in DETR models. D-FINE comprises two key components: Fine-grained Distribution Refinement (FDR) and Global Optimal Localization Self-Distillation (GO-LSD). FDR transforms the regression process from predicting fixed coordinates to iteratively refining probability distributions, providing a fine-grained intermediate representation that significantly enhances localization accuracy. GO-LSD is a bidirectional optimization strategy that transfers localization knowledge from refined distributions to shallower layers through self-distillation, while also simplifying the residual prediction tasks for deeper layers. Additionally, D-FINE incorporates lightweight optimizations in computationally intensive modules and operations, achieving a better balance between speed and accuracy. Specifically, D-FINE-L / X achieves 54.0% / 55.8% AP on the COCO dataset at 124 / 78 FPS on an NVIDIA T4 GPU. When pretrained on Objects365, D-FINE-L / X attains 57.1% / 59.3% AP, surpassing all existing real-time detectors. Furthermore, our method significantly enhances the performance of a wide range of DETR models by up to 5.3% AP with negligible extra parameters and training costs. Our code and pretrained models: https://github.com/Peterande/D-FINE.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 17, 2024

DEIM: DETR with Improved Matching for Fast Convergence

We introduce DEIM, an innovative and efficient training framework designed to accelerate convergence in real-time object detection with Transformer-based architectures (DETR). To mitigate the sparse supervision inherent in one-to-one (O2O) matching in DETR models, DEIM employs a Dense O2O matching strategy. This approach increases the number of positive samples per image by incorporating additional targets, using standard data augmentation techniques. While Dense O2O matching speeds up convergence, it also introduces numerous low-quality matches that could affect performance. To address this, we propose the Matchability-Aware Loss (MAL), a novel loss function that optimizes matches across various quality levels, enhancing the effectiveness of Dense O2O. Extensive experiments on the COCO dataset validate the efficacy of DEIM. When integrated with RT-DETR and D-FINE, it consistently boosts performance while reducing training time by 50%. Notably, paired with RT-DETRv2, DEIM achieves 53.2% AP in a single day of training on an NVIDIA 4090 GPU. Additionally, DEIM-trained real-time models outperform leading real-time object detectors, with DEIM-D-FINE-L and DEIM-D-FINE-X achieving 54.7% and 56.5% AP at 124 and 78 FPS on an NVIDIA T4 GPU, respectively, without the need for additional data. We believe DEIM sets a new baseline for advancements in real-time object detection. Our code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/ShihuaHuang95/DEIM.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 5, 2024 1

Tiny Robotics Dataset and Benchmark for Continual Object Detection

Detecting objects in mobile robotics is crucial for numerous applications, from autonomous navigation to inspection. However, robots are often required to perform tasks in different domains with respect to the training one and need to adapt to these changes. Tiny mobile robots, subject to size, power, and computational constraints, encounter even more difficulties in running and adapting these algorithms. Such adaptability, though, is crucial for real-world deployment, where robots must operate effectively in dynamic and unpredictable settings. In this work, we introduce a novel benchmark to evaluate the continual learning capabilities of object detection systems in tiny robotic platforms. Our contributions include: (i) Tiny Robotics Object Detection (TiROD), a comprehensive dataset collected using a small mobile robot, designed to test the adaptability of object detectors across various domains and classes; (ii) an evaluation of state-of-the-art real-time object detectors combined with different continual learning strategies on this dataset, providing detailed insights into their performance and limitations; and (iii) we publish the data and the code to replicate the results to foster continuous advancements in this field. Our benchmark results indicate key challenges that must be addressed to advance the development of robust and efficient object detection systems for tiny robotics.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 24, 2024

Mamba YOLO: SSMs-Based YOLO For Object Detection

Propelled by the rapid advancement of deep learning technologies, the YOLO series has set a new benchmark for real-time object detectors. Researchers have continuously explored innovative applications of reparameterization, efficient layer aggregation networks, and anchor-free techniques on the foundation of YOLO. To further enhance detection performance, Transformer-based structures have been introduced, significantly expanding the model's receptive field and achieving notable performance gains. However, such improvements come at a cost, as the quadratic complexity of the self-attention mechanism increases the computational burden of the model. Fortunately, the emergence of State Space Models (SSM) as an innovative technology has effectively mitigated the issues caused by quadratic complexity. In light of these advancements, we introduce Mamba-YOLO a novel object detection model based on SSM. Mamba-YOLO not only optimizes the SSM foundation but also adapts specifically for object detection tasks. Given the potential limitations of SSM in sequence modeling, such as insufficient receptive field and weak image locality, we have designed the LSBlock and RGBlock. These modules enable more precise capture of local image dependencies and significantly enhance the robustness of the model. Extensive experimental results on the publicly available benchmark datasets COCO and VOC demonstrate that Mamba-YOLO surpasses the existing YOLO series models in both performance and competitiveness, showcasing its substantial potential and competitive edge.The PyTorch code is available at:https://github.com/HZAI-ZJNU/Mamba-YOLO

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 9, 2024

DuET: Dual Incremental Object Detection via Exemplar-Free Task Arithmetic

Real-world object detection systems, such as those in autonomous driving and surveillance, must continuously learn new object categories and simultaneously adapt to changing environmental conditions. Existing approaches, Class Incremental Object Detection (CIOD) and Domain Incremental Object Detection (DIOD) only address one aspect of this challenge. CIOD struggles in unseen domains, while DIOD suffers from catastrophic forgetting when learning new classes, limiting their real-world applicability. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Dual Incremental Object Detection (DuIOD), a more practical setting that simultaneously handles class and domain shifts in an exemplar-free manner. We propose DuET, a Task Arithmetic-based model merging framework that enables stable incremental learning while mitigating sign conflicts through a novel Directional Consistency Loss. Unlike prior methods, DuET is detector-agnostic, allowing models like YOLO11 and RT-DETR to function as real-time incremental object detectors. To comprehensively evaluate both retention and adaptation, we introduce the Retention-Adaptability Index (RAI), which combines the Average Retention Index (Avg RI) for catastrophic forgetting and the Average Generalization Index for domain adaptability into a common ground. Extensive experiments on the Pascal Series and Diverse Weather Series demonstrate DuET's effectiveness, achieving a +13.12% RAI improvement while preserving 89.3% Avg RI on the Pascal Series (4 tasks), as well as a +11.39% RAI improvement with 88.57% Avg RI on the Diverse Weather Series (3 tasks), outperforming existing methods.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 26

A Real-Time Framework for Domain-Adaptive Underwater Object Detection with Image Enhancement

In recent years, significant progress has been made in the field of underwater image enhancement (UIE). However, its practical utility for high-level vision tasks, such as underwater object detection (UOD) in Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs), remains relatively unexplored. It may be attributed to several factors: (1) Existing methods typically employ UIE as a pre-processing step, which inevitably introduces considerable computational overhead and latency. (2) The process of enhancing images prior to training object detectors may not necessarily yield performance improvements. (3) The complex underwater environments can induce significant domain shifts across different scenarios, seriously deteriorating the UOD performance. To address these challenges, we introduce EnYOLO, an integrated real-time framework designed for simultaneous UIE and UOD with domain-adaptation capability. Specifically, both the UIE and UOD task heads share the same network backbone and utilize a lightweight design. Furthermore, to ensure balanced training for both tasks, we present a multi-stage training strategy aimed at consistently enhancing their performance. Additionally, we propose a novel domain-adaptation strategy to align feature embeddings originating from diverse underwater environments. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our framework not only achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in both UIE and UOD tasks, but also shows superior adaptability when applied to different underwater scenarios. Our efficiency analysis further highlights the substantial potential of our framework for onboard deployment.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 27, 2024

RoLA: A Real-Time Online Lightweight Anomaly Detection System for Multivariate Time Series

A multivariate time series refers to observations of two or more variables taken from a device or a system simultaneously over time. There is an increasing need to monitor multivariate time series and detect anomalies in real time to ensure proper system operation and good service quality. It is also highly desirable to have a lightweight anomaly detection system that considers correlations between different variables, adapts to changes in the pattern of the multivariate time series, offers immediate responses, and provides supportive information regarding detection results based on unsupervised learning and online model training. In the past decade, many multivariate time series anomaly detection approaches have been introduced. However, they are unable to offer all the above-mentioned features. In this paper, we propose RoLA, a real-time online lightweight anomaly detection system for multivariate time series based on a divide-and-conquer strategy, parallel processing, and the majority rule. RoLA employs multiple lightweight anomaly detectors to monitor multivariate time series in parallel, determine the correlations between variables dynamically on the fly, and then jointly detect anomalies based on the majority rule in real time. To demonstrate the performance of RoLA, we conducted an experiment based on a public dataset provided by the FerryBox of the One Ocean Expedition. The results show that RoLA provides satisfactory detection accuracy and lightweight performance.

  • 2 authors
·
May 25, 2023

DETRs Beat YOLOs on Real-time Object Detection

The YOLO series has become the most popular framework for real-time object detection due to its reasonable trade-off between speed and accuracy. However, we observe that the speed and accuracy of YOLOs are negatively affected by the NMS. Recently, end-to-end Transformer-based detectors (DETRs) have provided an alternative to eliminating NMS. Nevertheless, the high computational cost limits their practicality and hinders them from fully exploiting the advantage of excluding NMS. In this paper, we propose the Real-Time DEtection TRansformer (RT-DETR), the first real-time end-to-end object detector to our best knowledge that addresses the above dilemma. We build RT-DETR in two steps, drawing on the advanced DETR: first we focus on maintaining accuracy while improving speed, followed by maintaining speed while improving accuracy. Specifically, we design an efficient hybrid encoder to expeditiously process multi-scale features by decoupling intra-scale interaction and cross-scale fusion to improve speed. Then, we propose the uncertainty-minimal query selection to provide high-quality initial queries to the decoder, thereby improving accuracy. In addition, RT-DETR supports flexible speed tuning by adjusting the number of decoder layers to adapt to various scenarios without retraining. Our RT-DETR-R50 / R101 achieves 53.1% / 54.3% AP on COCO and 108 / 74 FPS on T4 GPU, outperforming previously advanced YOLOs in both speed and accuracy. We also develop scaled RT-DETRs that outperform the lighter YOLO detectors (S and M models). Furthermore, RT-DETR-R50 outperforms DINO-R50 by 2.2% AP in accuracy and about 21 times in FPS. After pre-training with Objects365, RT-DETR-R50 / R101 achieves 55.3% / 56.2% AP. The project page: https://zhao-yian.github.io/RTDETR.

  • 8 authors
·
Apr 17, 2023

LSDNet: Trainable Modification of LSD Algorithm for Real-Time Line Segment Detection

As of today, the best accuracy in line segment detection (LSD) is achieved by algorithms based on convolutional neural networks - CNNs. Unfortunately, these methods utilize deep, heavy networks and are slower than traditional model-based detectors. In this paper we build an accurate yet fast CNN- based detector, LSDNet, by incorporating a lightweight CNN into a classical LSD detector. Specifically, we replace the first step of the original LSD algorithm - construction of line segments heatmap and tangent field from raw image gradients - with a lightweight CNN, which is able to calculate more complex and rich features. The second part of the LSD algorithm is used with only minor modifications. Compared with several modern line segment detectors on standard Wireframe dataset, the proposed LSDNet provides the highest speed (among CNN-based detectors) of 214 FPS with a competitive accuracy of 78 Fh . Although the best-reported accuracy is 83 Fh at 33 FPS, we speculate that the observed accuracy gap is caused by errors in annotations and the actual gap is significantly lower. We point out systematic inconsistencies in the annotations of popular line detection benchmarks - Wireframe and York Urban, carefully reannotate a subset of images and show that (i) existing detectors have improved quality on updated annotations without retraining, suggesting that new annotations correlate better with the notion of correct line segment detection; (ii) the gap between accuracies of our detector and others diminishes to negligible 0.2 Fh , with our method being the fastest.

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 10, 2022

An Energy and GPU-Computation Efficient Backbone Network for Real-Time Object Detection

As DenseNet conserves intermediate features with diverse receptive fields by aggregating them with dense connection, it shows good performance on the object detection task. Although feature reuse enables DenseNet to produce strong features with a small number of model parameters and FLOPs, the detector with DenseNet backbone shows rather slow speed and low energy efficiency. We find the linearly increasing input channel by dense connection leads to heavy memory access cost, which causes computation overhead and more energy consumption. To solve the inefficiency of DenseNet, we propose an energy and computation efficient architecture called VoVNet comprised of One-Shot Aggregation (OSA). The OSA not only adopts the strength of DenseNet that represents diversified features with multi receptive fields but also overcomes the inefficiency of dense connection by aggregating all features only once in the last feature maps. To validate the effectiveness of VoVNet as a backbone network, we design both lightweight and large-scale VoVNet and apply them to one-stage and two-stage object detectors. Our VoVNet based detectors outperform DenseNet based ones with 2x faster speed and the energy consumptions are reduced by 1.6x - 4.1x. In addition to DenseNet, VoVNet also outperforms widely used ResNet backbone with faster speed and better energy efficiency. In particular, the small object detection performance has been significantly improved over DenseNet and ResNet.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 22, 2019

Neural Compression and Filtering for Edge-assisted Real-time Object Detection in Challenged Networks

The edge computing paradigm places compute-capable devices - edge servers - at the network edge to assist mobile devices in executing data analysis tasks. Intuitively, offloading compute-intense tasks to edge servers can reduce their execution time. However, poor conditions of the wireless channel connecting the mobile devices to the edge servers may degrade the overall capture-to-output delay achieved by edge offloading. Herein, we focus on edge computing supporting remote object detection by means of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), and develop a framework to reduce the amount of data transmitted over the wireless link. The core idea we propose builds on recent approaches splitting DNNs into sections - namely head and tail models - executed by the mobile device and edge server, respectively. The wireless link, then, is used to transport the output of the last layer of the head model to the edge server, instead of the DNN input. Most prior work focuses on classification tasks and leaves the DNN structure unaltered. Herein, our focus is on DNNs for three different object detection tasks, which present a much more convoluted structure, and modify the architecture of the network to: (i) achieve in-network compression by introducing a bottleneck layer in the early layers on the head model, and (ii) prefilter pictures that do not contain objects of interest using a convolutional neural network. Results show that the proposed technique represents an effective intermediate option between local and edge computing in a parameter region where these extreme point solutions fail to provide satisfactory performance. The code and trained models are available at https://github.com/yoshitomo-matsubara/hnd-ghnd-object-detectors .

  • 2 authors
·
Jul 30, 2020

YOLO26: Key Architectural Enhancements and Performance Benchmarking for Real-Time Object Detection

This study presents a comprehensive analysis of Ultralytics YOLO26, highlighting its key architectural enhancements and performance benchmarking for real-time object detection. YOLO26, released in September 2025, stands as the newest and most advanced member of the YOLO family, purpose-built to deliver efficiency, accuracy, and deployment readiness on edge and low-power devices. The paper sequentially details architectural innovations of YOLO26, including the removal of Distribution Focal Loss (DFL), adoption of end-to-end NMS-free inference, integration of ProgLoss and Small-Target-Aware Label Assignment (STAL), and the introduction of the MuSGD optimizer for stable convergence. Beyond architecture, the study positions YOLO26 as a multi-task framework, supporting object detection, instance segmentation, pose/keypoints estimation, oriented detection, and classification. We present performance benchmarks of YOLO26 on edge devices such as NVIDIA Jetson Nano and Orin, comparing its results with YOLOv8, YOLOv11, YOLOv12, YOLOv13, and transformer-based detectors(RF-DETR and RT-DETR). This paper further explores real-time deployment pathways, flexible export options (ONNX, TensorRT, CoreML, TFLite), and quantization for INT8/FP16. Practical use cases of YOLO26 across robotics, manufacturing, and IoT are highlighted to demonstrate cross-industry adaptability. Finally, insights on deployment efficiency and broader implications are discussed, with future directions for YOLO26 and the YOLO lineage outlined.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 29

Dynamic-DINO: Fine-Grained Mixture of Experts Tuning for Real-time Open-Vocabulary Object Detection

The Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture has excelled in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), yet its potential in real-time open-vocabulary object detectors, which also leverage large-scale vision-language datasets but smaller models, remains unexplored. This work investigates this domain, revealing intriguing insights. In the shallow layers, experts tend to cooperate with diverse peers to expand the search space. While in the deeper layers, fixed collaborative structures emerge, where each expert maintains 2-3 fixed partners and distinct expert combinations are specialized in processing specific patterns. Concretely, we propose Dynamic-DINO, which extends Grounding DINO 1.5 Edge from a dense model to a dynamic inference framework via an efficient MoE-Tuning strategy. Additionally, we design a granularity decomposition mechanism to decompose the Feed-Forward Network (FFN) of base model into multiple smaller expert networks, expanding the subnet search space. To prevent performance degradation at the start of fine-tuning, we further propose a pre-trained weight allocation strategy for the experts, coupled with a specific router initialization. During inference, only the input-relevant experts are activated to form a compact subnet. Experiments show that, pretrained with merely 1.56M open-source data, Dynamic-DINO outperforms Grounding DINO 1.5 Edge, pretrained on the private Grounding20M dataset.

  • 8 authors
·
Jul 23

EvRT-DETR: Latent Space Adaptation of Image Detectors for Event-based Vision

Event-based cameras (EBCs) have emerged as a bio-inspired alternative to traditional cameras, offering advantages in power efficiency, temporal resolution, and high dynamic range. However, the development of image analysis methods for EBCs is challenging due to the sparse and asynchronous nature of the data. This work addresses the problem of object detection for EBC cameras. The current approaches to EBC object detection focus on constructing complex data representations and rely on specialized architectures. We introduce I2EvDet (Image-to-Event Detection), a novel adaptation framework that bridges mainstream object detection with temporal event data processing. First, we demonstrate that a Real-Time DEtection TRansformer, or RT-DETR, a state-of-the-art natural image detector, trained on a simple image-like representation of the EBC data achieves performance comparable to specialized EBC methods. Next, as part of our framework, we develop an efficient adaptation technique that transforms image-based detectors into event-based detection models by modifying their frozen latent representation space through minimal architectural additions. The resulting EvRT-DETR model reaches state-of-the-art performance on the standard benchmark datasets Gen1 (mAP +2.3) and 1Mpx/Gen4 (mAP +1.4). These results demonstrate a fundamentally new approach to EBC object detection through principled adaptation of mainstream architectures, offering an efficient alternative with potential applications to other temporal visual domains. The code is available at: https://github.com/realtime-intelligence/evrt-detr

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 3, 2024

Make Your ViT-based Multi-view 3D Detectors Faster via Token Compression

Slow inference speed is one of the most crucial concerns for deploying multi-view 3D detectors to tasks with high real-time requirements like autonomous driving. Although many sparse query-based methods have already attempted to improve the efficiency of 3D detectors, they neglect to consider the backbone, especially when using Vision Transformers (ViT) for better performance. To tackle this problem, we explore the efficient ViT backbones for multi-view 3D detection via token compression and propose a simple yet effective method called TokenCompression3D (ToC3D). By leveraging history object queries as foreground priors of high quality, modeling 3D motion information in them, and interacting them with image tokens through the attention mechanism, ToC3D can effectively determine the magnitude of information densities of image tokens and segment the salient foreground tokens. With the introduced dynamic router design, ToC3D can weigh more computing resources to important foreground tokens while compressing the information loss, leading to a more efficient ViT-based multi-view 3D detector. Extensive results on the large-scale nuScenes dataset show that our method can nearly maintain the performance of recent SOTA with up to 30% inference speedup, and the improvements are consistent after scaling up the ViT and input resolution. The code will be made at https://github.com/DYZhang09/ToC3D.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 1, 2024

HierLight-YOLO: A Hierarchical and Lightweight Object Detection Network for UAV Photography

The real-time detection of small objects in complex scenes, such as the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) photography captured by drones, has dual challenges of detecting small targets (<32 pixels) and maintaining real-time efficiency on resource-constrained platforms. While YOLO-series detectors have achieved remarkable success in real-time large object detection, they suffer from significantly higher false negative rates for drone-based detection where small objects dominate, compared to large object scenarios. This paper proposes HierLight-YOLO, a hierarchical feature fusion and lightweight model that enhances the real-time detection of small objects, based on the YOLOv8 architecture. We propose the Hierarchical Extended Path Aggregation Network (HEPAN), a multi-scale feature fusion method through hierarchical cross-level connections, enhancing the small object detection accuracy. HierLight-YOLO includes two innovative lightweight modules: Inverted Residual Depthwise Convolution Block (IRDCB) and Lightweight Downsample (LDown) module, which significantly reduce the model's parameters and computational complexity without sacrificing detection capabilities. Small object detection head is designed to further enhance spatial resolution and feature fusion to tackle the tiny object (4 pixels) detection. Comparison experiments and ablation studies on the VisDrone2019 benchmark demonstrate state-of-the-art performance of HierLight-YOLO.

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 26

CenterNet3D: An Anchor Free Object Detector for Point Cloud

Accurate and fast 3D object detection from point clouds is a key task in autonomous driving. Existing one-stage 3D object detection methods can achieve real-time performance, however, they are dominated by anchor-based detectors which are inefficient and require additional post-processing. In this paper, we eliminate anchors and model an object as a single point--the center point of its bounding box. Based on the center point, we propose an anchor-free CenterNet3D network that performs 3D object detection without anchors. Our CenterNet3D uses keypoint estimation to find center points and directly regresses 3D bounding boxes. However, because inherent sparsity of point clouds, 3D object center points are likely to be in empty space which makes it difficult to estimate accurate boundaries. To solve this issue, we propose an extra corner attention module to enforce the CNN backbone to pay more attention to object boundaries. Besides, considering that one-stage detectors suffer from the discordance between the predicted bounding boxes and corresponding classification confidences, we develop an efficient keypoint-sensitive warping operation to align the confidences to the predicted bounding boxes. Our proposed CenterNet3D is non-maximum suppression free which makes it more efficient and simpler. We evaluate CenterNet3D on the widely used KITTI dataset and more challenging nuScenes dataset. Our method outperforms all state-of-the-art anchor-based one-stage methods and has comparable performance to two-stage methods as well. It has an inference speed of 20 FPS and achieves the best speed and accuracy trade-off. Our source code will be released at https://github.com/wangguojun2018/CenterNet3d.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 13, 2020

MORDA: A Synthetic Dataset to Facilitate Adaptation of Object Detectors to Unseen Real-target Domain While Preserving Performance on Real-source Domain

Deep neural network (DNN) based perception models are indispensable in the development of autonomous vehicles (AVs). However, their reliance on large-scale, high-quality data is broadly recognized as a burdensome necessity due to the substantial cost of data acquisition and labeling. Further, the issue is not a one-time concern, as AVs might need a new dataset if they are to be deployed to another region (real-target domain) that the in-hand dataset within the real-source domain cannot incorporate. To mitigate this burden, we propose leveraging synthetic environments as an auxiliary domain where the characteristics of real domains are reproduced. This approach could enable indirect experience about the real-target domain in a time- and cost-effective manner. As a practical demonstration of our methodology, nuScenes and South Korea are employed to represent real-source and real-target domains, respectively. That means we construct digital twins for several regions of South Korea, and the data-acquisition framework of nuScenes is reproduced. Blending the aforementioned components within a simulator allows us to obtain a synthetic-fusion domain in which we forge our novel driving dataset, MORDA: Mixture Of Real-domain characteristics for synthetic-data-assisted Domain Adaptation. To verify the value of synthetic features that MORDA provides in learning about driving environments of South Korea, 2D/3D detectors are trained solely on a combination of nuScenes and MORDA. Afterward, their performance is evaluated on the unforeseen real-world dataset (AI-Hub) collected in South Korea. Our experiments present that MORDA can significantly improve mean Average Precision (mAP) on AI-Hub dataset while that on nuScenes is retained or slightly enhanced.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 8

Coconut Palm Tree Counting on Drone Images with Deep Object Detection and Synthetic Training Data

Drones have revolutionized various domains, including agriculture. Recent advances in deep learning have propelled among other things object detection in computer vision. This study utilized YOLO, a real-time object detector, to identify and count coconut palm trees in Ghanaian farm drone footage. The farm presented has lost track of its trees due to different planting phases. While manual counting would be very tedious and error-prone, accurately determining the number of trees is crucial for efficient planning and management of agricultural processes, especially for optimizing yields and predicting production. We assessed YOLO for palm detection within a semi-automated framework, evaluated accuracy augmentations, and pondered its potential for farmers. Data was captured in September 2022 via drones. To optimize YOLO with scarce data, synthetic images were created for model training and validation. The YOLOv7 model, pretrained on the COCO dataset (excluding coconut palms), was adapted using tailored data. Trees from footage were repositioned on synthetic images, with testing on distinct authentic images. In our experiments, we adjusted hyperparameters, improving YOLO's mean average precision (mAP). We also tested various altitudes to determine the best drone height. From an initial mAP@.5 of 0.65, we achieved 0.88, highlighting the value of synthetic images in agricultural scenarios.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 16, 2024

A Real-time Faint Space Debris Detector With Learning-based LCM

With the development of aerospace technology, the increasing population of space debris has posed a great threat to the safety of spacecraft. However, the low intensity of reflected light and high angular velocity of space debris impede the extraction. Besides, due to the limitations of the ground observation methods, small space debris can hardly be detected, making it necessary to enhance the spacecraft's capacity for space situational awareness (SSA). Considering that traditional methods have some defects in low-SNR target detection, such as low effectiveness and large time consumption, this paper proposes a method for low-SNR streak extraction based on local contrast and maximum likelihood estimation (MLE), which can detect space objects with SNR 2.0 efficiently. In the proposed algorithm, local contrast will be applied for crude classifications, which will return connected components as preliminary results, and then MLE will be performed to reconstruct the connected components of targets via orientated growth, further improving the precision. The algorithm has been verified with both simulated streaks and real star tracker images, and the average centroid error of the proposed algorithm is close to the state-of-the-art method like ODCC. At the same time, the algorithm in this paper has significant advantages in efficiency compared with ODCC. In conclusion, the algorithm in this paper is of high speed and precision, which guarantees its promising applications in the extraction of high dynamic targets.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 15, 2023

HopTrack: A Real-time Multi-Object Tracking System for Embedded Devices

Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) poses significant challenges in computer vision. Despite its wide application in robotics, autonomous driving, and smart manufacturing, there is limited literature addressing the specific challenges of running MOT on embedded devices. State-of-the-art MOT trackers designed for high-end GPUs often experience low processing rates (<11fps) when deployed on embedded devices. Existing MOT frameworks for embedded devices proposed strategies such as fusing the detector model with the feature embedding model to reduce inference latency or combining different trackers to improve tracking accuracy, but tend to compromise one for the other. This paper introduces HopTrack, a real-time multi-object tracking system tailored for embedded devices. Our system employs a novel discretized static and dynamic matching approach along with an innovative content-aware dynamic sampling technique to enhance tracking accuracy while meeting the real-time requirement. Compared with the best high-end GPU modified baseline Byte (Embed) and the best existing baseline on embedded devices MobileNet-JDE, HopTrack achieves a processing speed of up to 39.29 fps on NVIDIA AGX Xavier with a multi-object tracking accuracy (MOTA) of up to 63.12% on the MOT16 benchmark, outperforming both counterparts by 2.15% and 4.82%, respectively. Additionally, the accuracy improvement is coupled with the reduction in energy consumption (20.8%), power (5%), and memory usage (8%), which are crucial resources on embedded devices. HopTrack is also detector agnostic allowing the flexibility of plug-and-play.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 1, 2024

Advance Real-time Detection of Traffic Incidents in Highways using Vehicle Trajectory Data

A significant number of traffic crashes are secondary crashes that occur because of an earlier incident on the road. Thus, early detection of traffic incidents is crucial for road users from safety perspectives with a potential to reduce the risk of secondary crashes. The wide availability of GPS devices now-a-days gives an opportunity of tracking and recording vehicle trajectories. The objective of this study is to use vehicle trajectory data for advance real-time detection of traffic incidents on highways using machine learning-based algorithms. The study uses three days of unevenly sequenced vehicle trajectory data and traffic incident data on I-10, one of the most crash-prone highways in Louisiana. Vehicle trajectories are converted to trajectories based on virtual detector locations to maintain spatial uniformity as well as to generate historical traffic data for machine learning algorithms. Trips matched with traffic incidents on the way are separated and along with other trips with similar spatial attributes are used to build a database for modeling. Multiple machine learning algorithms such as Logistic Regression, Random Forest, Extreme Gradient Boost, and Artificial Neural Network models are used to detect a trajectory that is likely to face an incident in the downstream road section. Results suggest that the Random Forest model achieves the best performance for predicting an incident with reasonable recall value and discrimination capability.

  • 2 authors
·
Aug 14, 2024

Real-Time Scene Text Detection with Differentiable Binarization and Adaptive Scale Fusion

Recently, segmentation-based scene text detection methods have drawn extensive attention in the scene text detection field, because of their superiority in detecting the text instances of arbitrary shapes and extreme aspect ratios, profiting from the pixel-level descriptions. However, the vast majority of the existing segmentation-based approaches are limited to their complex post-processing algorithms and the scale robustness of their segmentation models, where the post-processing algorithms are not only isolated to the model optimization but also time-consuming and the scale robustness is usually strengthened by fusing multi-scale feature maps directly. In this paper, we propose a Differentiable Binarization (DB) module that integrates the binarization process, one of the most important steps in the post-processing procedure, into a segmentation network. Optimized along with the proposed DB module, the segmentation network can produce more accurate results, which enhances the accuracy of text detection with a simple pipeline. Furthermore, an efficient Adaptive Scale Fusion (ASF) module is proposed to improve the scale robustness by fusing features of different scales adaptively. By incorporating the proposed DB and ASF with the segmentation network, our proposed scene text detector consistently achieves state-of-the-art results, in terms of both detection accuracy and speed, on five standard benchmarks.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 21, 2022

Real-Time Flying Object Detection with YOLOv8

This paper presents a generalized model for real-time detection of flying objects that can be used for transfer learning and further research, as well as a refined model that is ready for implementation. We achieve this by training our first generalized model on a data set containing 40 different classes of flying objects, forcing the model to extract abstract feature representations. We then perform transfer learning with these learned parameters on a data set more representative of real world environments (i.e., higher frequency of occlusion, small spatial sizes, rotations, etc.) to generate our refined model. Object detection of flying objects remains challenging due to large variance object spatial sizes/aspect ratios, rate of speed, occlusion, and clustered backgrounds. To address some of the presented challenges while simultaneously maximizing performance, we utilize the current state of the art single-shot detector, YOLOv8, in an attempt to find the best tradeoff between inference speed and mAP. While YOLOv8 is being regarded as the new state-of-the-art, an official paper has not been provided. Thus, we provide an in-depth explanation of the new architecture and functionality that YOLOv8 has adapted. Our final generalized model achieves an mAP50-95 of 0.685 and average inference speed on 1080p videos of 50 fps. Our final refined model maintains this inference speed and achieves an improved mAP50-95 of 0.835.

  • 4 authors
·
May 17, 2023

DAMO-YOLO : A Report on Real-Time Object Detection Design

In this report, we present a fast and accurate object detection method dubbed DAMO-YOLO, which achieves higher performance than the state-of-the-art YOLO series. DAMO-YOLO is extended from YOLO with some new technologies, including Neural Architecture Search (NAS), efficient Reparameterized Generalized-FPN (RepGFPN), a lightweight head with AlignedOTA label assignment, and distillation enhancement. In particular, we use MAE-NAS, a method guided by the principle of maximum entropy, to search our detection backbone under the constraints of low latency and high performance, producing ResNet-like / CSP-like structures with spatial pyramid pooling and focus modules. In the design of necks and heads, we follow the rule of "large neck, small head". We import Generalized-FPN with accelerated queen-fusion to build the detector neck and upgrade its CSPNet with efficient layer aggregation networks (ELAN) and reparameterization. Then we investigate how detector head size affects detection performance and find that a heavy neck with only one task projection layer would yield better results. In addition, AlignedOTA is proposed to solve the misalignment problem in label assignment. And a distillation schema is introduced to improve performance to a higher level. Based on these new techs, we build a suite of models at various scales to meet the needs of different scenarios, i.e., DAMO-YOLO-Tiny/Small/Medium. They can achieve 43.0/46.8/50.0 mAPs on COCO with the latency of 2.78/3.83/5.62 ms on T4 GPUs respectively. The code is available at https://github.com/tinyvision/damo-yolo.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 23, 2022

YOLOv13: Real-Time Object Detection with Hypergraph-Enhanced Adaptive Visual Perception

The YOLO series models reign supreme in real-time object detection due to their superior accuracy and computational efficiency. However, both the convolutional architectures of YOLO11 and earlier versions and the area-based self-attention mechanism introduced in YOLOv12 are limited to local information aggregation and pairwise correlation modeling, lacking the capability to capture global multi-to-multi high-order correlations, which limits detection performance in complex scenarios. In this paper, we propose YOLOv13, an accurate and lightweight object detector. To address the above-mentioned challenges, we propose a Hypergraph-based Adaptive Correlation Enhancement (HyperACE) mechanism that adaptively exploits latent high-order correlations and overcomes the limitation of previous methods that are restricted to pairwise correlation modeling based on hypergraph computation, achieving efficient global cross-location and cross-scale feature fusion and enhancement. Subsequently, we propose a Full-Pipeline Aggregation-and-Distribution (FullPAD) paradigm based on HyperACE, which effectively achieves fine-grained information flow and representation synergy within the entire network by distributing correlation-enhanced features to the full pipeline. Finally, we propose to leverage depthwise separable convolutions to replace vanilla large-kernel convolutions, and design a series of blocks that significantly reduce parameters and computational complexity without sacrificing performance. We conduct extensive experiments on the widely used MS COCO benchmark, and the experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance with fewer parameters and FLOPs. Specifically, our YOLOv13-N improves mAP by 3.0\% over YOLO11-N and by 1.5\% over YOLOv12-N. The code and models of our YOLOv13 model are available at: https://github.com/iMoonLab/yolov13.

  • 10 authors
·
Jun 21

AI-in-the-Loop: Privacy Preserving Real-Time Scam Detection and Conversational Scambaiting by Leveraging LLMs and Federated Learning

Scams exploiting real-time social engineering -- such as phishing, impersonation, and phone fraud -- remain a persistent and evolving threat across digital platforms. Existing defenses are largely reactive, offering limited protection during active interactions. We propose a privacy-preserving, AI-in-the-loop framework that proactively detects and disrupts scam conversations in real time. The system combines instruction-tuned artificial intelligence with a safety-aware utility function that balances engagement with harm minimization, and employs federated learning to enable continual model updates without raw data sharing. Experimental evaluations show that the system produces fluent and engaging responses (perplexity as low as 22.3, engagement approx0.80), while human studies confirm significant gains in realism, safety, and effectiveness over strong baselines. In federated settings, models trained with FedAvg sustain up to 30 rounds while preserving high engagement (approx0.80), strong relevance (approx0.74), and low PII leakage (leq0.0085). Even with differential privacy, novelty and safety remain stable, indicating that robust privacy can be achieved without sacrificing performance. The evaluation of guard models (LlamaGuard, LlamaGuard2/3, MD-Judge) shows a straightforward pattern: stricter moderation settings reduce the chance of exposing personal information, but they also limit how much the model engages in conversation. In contrast, more relaxed settings allow longer and richer interactions, which improve scam detection, but at the cost of higher privacy risk. To our knowledge, this is the first framework to unify real-time scam-baiting, federated privacy preservation, and calibrated safety moderation into a proactive defense paradigm.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 3

VSViG: Real-time Video-based Seizure Detection via Skeleton-based Spatiotemporal ViG

An accurate and efficient epileptic seizure onset detection can significantly benefit patients. Traditional diagnostic methods, primarily relying on electroencephalograms (EEGs), often result in cumbersome and non-portable solutions, making continuous patient monitoring challenging. The video-based seizure detection system is expected to free patients from the constraints of scalp or implanted EEG devices and enable remote monitoring in residential settings. Previous video-based methods neither enable all-day monitoring nor provide short detection latency due to insufficient resources and ineffective patient action recognition techniques. Additionally, skeleton-based action recognition approaches remain limitations in identifying subtle seizure-related actions. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Video-based Seizure detection model via a skeleton-based spatiotemporal Vision Graph neural network (VSViG) for its efficient, accurate and timely purpose in real-time scenarios. Our experimental results indicate VSViG outperforms previous state-of-the-art action recognition models on our collected patients' video data with higher accuracy (5.9% error), lower FLOPs (0.4G), and smaller model size (1.4M). Furthermore, by integrating a decision-making rule that combines output probabilities and an accumulative function, we achieve a 5.1 s detection latency after EEG onset, a 13.1 s detection advance before clinical onset, and a zero false detection rate. The project homepage is available at: https://github.com/xuyankun/VSViG/

  • 7 authors
·
Nov 24, 2023

AI-Driven Real-Time Monitoring of Ground-Nesting Birds: A Case Study on Curlew Detection Using YOLOv10

Effective monitoring of wildlife is critical for assessing biodiversity and ecosystem health, as declines in key species often signal significant environmental changes. Birds, particularly ground-nesting species, serve as important ecological indicators due to their sensitivity to environmental pressures. Camera traps have become indispensable tools for monitoring nesting bird populations, enabling data collection across diverse habitats. However, the manual processing and analysis of such data are resource-intensive, often delaying the delivery of actionable conservation insights. This study presents an AI-driven approach for real-time species detection, focusing on the curlew (Numenius arquata), a ground-nesting bird experiencing significant population declines. A custom-trained YOLOv10 model was developed to detect and classify curlews and their chicks using 3/4G-enabled cameras linked to the Conservation AI platform. The system processes camera trap data in real-time, significantly enhancing monitoring efficiency. Across 11 nesting sites in Wales, the model achieved high performance, with a sensitivity of 90.56%, specificity of 100%, and F1-score of 95.05% for curlew detections, and a sensitivity of 92.35%, specificity of 100%, and F1-score of 96.03% for curlew chick detections. These results demonstrate the capability of AI-driven monitoring systems to deliver accurate, timely data for biodiversity assessments, facilitating early conservation interventions and advancing the use of technology in ecological research.

  • 9 authors
·
Nov 22, 2024

Follow Anything: Open-set detection, tracking, and following in real-time

Tracking and following objects of interest is critical to several robotics use cases, ranging from industrial automation to logistics and warehousing, to healthcare and security. In this paper, we present a robotic system to detect, track, and follow any object in real-time. Our approach, dubbed ``follow anything'' (FAn), is an open-vocabulary and multimodal model -- it is not restricted to concepts seen at training time and can be applied to novel classes at inference time using text, images, or click queries. Leveraging rich visual descriptors from large-scale pre-trained models (foundation models), FAn can detect and segment objects by matching multimodal queries (text, images, clicks) against an input image sequence. These detected and segmented objects are tracked across image frames, all while accounting for occlusion and object re-emergence. We demonstrate FAn on a real-world robotic system (a micro aerial vehicle) and report its ability to seamlessly follow the objects of interest in a real-time control loop. FAn can be deployed on a laptop with a lightweight (6-8 GB) graphics card, achieving a throughput of 6-20 frames per second. To enable rapid adoption, deployment, and extensibility, we open-source all our code on our project webpage at https://github.com/alaamaalouf/FollowAnything . We also encourage the reader the watch our 5-minutes explainer video in this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Mgt3EPytrw .

  • 8 authors
·
Aug 10, 2023

TPM-Based Continuous Remote Attestation and Integrity Verification for 5G VNFs on Kubernetes

In the rapidly evolving landscape of 5G technology, the adoption of cloud-based infrastructure for the deployment of 5G services has become increasingly common. Using a service-based architecture, critical 5G components, such as the Access and Mobility Management Function (AMF), Session Management Function (SMF), and User Plane Function (UPF), now run as containerized pods on Kubernetes clusters. Although this approach improves scalability, flexibility, and resilience, it also introduces new security challenges, particularly to ensure the integrity and trustworthiness of these components. Current 5G security specifications (for example, 3GPP TS 33.501) focus on communication security and assume that network functions remain trustworthy after authentication, consequently lacking mechanisms to continuously validate the integrity of NVFs at runtime. To close this gap, and to align with Zero Trust principles of 'never trust, always verify', we present a TPM 2.0-based continuous remote attestation solution for core 5G components deployed on Kubernetes. Our approach uses the Linux Integrity Measurement Architecture (IMA) and a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) to provide hardware-based runtime validation. We integrate the open-source Keylime framework with a custom IMA template that isolates pod-level measurements, allowing per-pod integrity verification. A prototype on a k3s cluster (consisting of 1 master, 2 worker nodes) was implemented to attest to core functions, including AMF, SMF and UPF. The experimental results show that the system detects unauthorized modifications in real time, labels each pod's trust state, and generates detailed audit logs. This work provides hardware-based continuous attestation for cloud native and edge deployments, strengthening the resilience of 5G as critical infrastructure in multi-vendor and mission-critical scenarios of 5G.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 3

Deep Synoptic Array Science: Searching for Long Duration Radio Transients with the DSA-110

We describe the design and commissioning tests for the DSA-110 Not-So-Fast Radio Burst (NSFRB) search pipeline, a 1.4 GHz image-plane single-pulse search sensitive to 134 ms-160.8 s radio bursts. Extending the pulse width range of the Fast Radio Burst (FRB) search by 3 orders of magnitude, the NSFRB search is sensitive to the recently-discovered Galactic Long Period Radio Transients (LPRTs). The NSFRB search operates in real-time, utilizing a custom GPU-accelerated search code, cerberus, implemented in Python with JAX. We summarize successful commissioning sensitivity tests with continuum sources and pulsar B0329+54, estimating the 6sigma flux (fluence) threshold to be ~290 mJy (~40 Jy ms). Future tests of recovery of longer timescale transients, e.g. CHIME J1634+44, are planned to supplement injection testing and B0329+54 observations. An offline DSA-110 NSFRB Galactic Plane Survey was conducted to search for LPRTs, covering -3.5^circ<b<5.7^circ and 141^circ<l<225^circ (~770 square degrees) in Galactic coordinates. We estimate an upper limit Poissonian burst rate ~1 hr^{-1} per square degree (~7 hr^{-1} per 3^circtimes3^circ survey grid cell) maximized across the inner |b|<0.25^circ of the surveyed region. By imposing the ~290 mJy flux limit on two representative models (the magnetar plastic flow model and the White Dwarf-M Dwarf binary model), we reject with 95% confidence the presence of White Dwarf-M Dwarf binary LPRTs with periods between ~10-70s within ~95% of the surveyed region. Combined with the prevalence of LPRTs in the Galactic Plane, our results motivate further consideration of both White Dwarf-M Dwarf binary models and isolated magnetar models. We will continue to explore novel LPRT search strategies during real-time operations, such as triggered periodicity searches and additional targeted surveys.

  • 13 authors
·
Oct 20

FlexEvent: Event Camera Object Detection at Arbitrary Frequencies

Event cameras offer unparalleled advantages for real-time perception in dynamic environments, thanks to their microsecond-level temporal resolution and asynchronous operation. Existing event-based object detection methods, however, are limited by fixed-frequency paradigms and fail to fully exploit the high-temporal resolution and adaptability of event cameras. To address these limitations, we propose FlexEvent, a novel event camera object detection framework that enables detection at arbitrary frequencies. Our approach consists of two key components: FlexFuser, an adaptive event-frame fusion module that integrates high-frequency event data with rich semantic information from RGB frames, and FAL, a frequency-adaptive learning mechanism that generates frequency-adjusted labels to enhance model generalization across varying operational frequencies. This combination allows our method to detect objects with high accuracy in both fast-moving and static scenarios, while adapting to dynamic environments. Extensive experiments on large-scale event camera datasets demonstrate that our approach surpasses state-of-the-art methods, achieving significant improvements in both standard and high-frequency settings. Notably, our method maintains robust performance when scaling from 20 Hz to 90 Hz and delivers accurate detection up to 180 Hz, proving its effectiveness in extreme conditions. Our framework sets a new benchmark for event-based object detection and paves the way for more adaptable, real-time vision systems.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 9, 2024

EVPropNet: Detecting Drones By Finding Propellers For Mid-Air Landing And Following

The rapid rise of accessibility of unmanned aerial vehicles or drones pose a threat to general security and confidentiality. Most of the commercially available or custom-built drones are multi-rotors and are comprised of multiple propellers. Since these propellers rotate at a high-speed, they are generally the fastest moving parts of an image and cannot be directly "seen" by a classical camera without severe motion blur. We utilize a class of sensors that are particularly suitable for such scenarios called event cameras, which have a high temporal resolution, low-latency, and high dynamic range. In this paper, we model the geometry of a propeller and use it to generate simulated events which are used to train a deep neural network called EVPropNet to detect propellers from the data of an event camera. EVPropNet directly transfers to the real world without any fine-tuning or retraining. We present two applications of our network: (a) tracking and following an unmarked drone and (b) landing on a near-hover drone. We successfully evaluate and demonstrate the proposed approach in many real-world experiments with different propeller shapes and sizes. Our network can detect propellers at a rate of 85.1% even when 60% of the propeller is occluded and can run at upto 35Hz on a 2W power budget. To our knowledge, this is the first deep learning-based solution for detecting propellers (to detect drones). Finally, our applications also show an impressive success rate of 92% and 90% for the tracking and landing tasks respectively.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 28, 2021

Context R-CNN: Long Term Temporal Context for Per-Camera Object Detection

In static monitoring cameras, useful contextual information can stretch far beyond the few seconds typical video understanding models might see: subjects may exhibit similar behavior over multiple days, and background objects remain static. Due to power and storage constraints, sampling frequencies are low, often no faster than one frame per second, and sometimes are irregular due to the use of a motion trigger. In order to perform well in this setting, models must be robust to irregular sampling rates. In this paper we propose a method that leverages temporal context from the unlabeled frames of a novel camera to improve performance at that camera. Specifically, we propose an attention-based approach that allows our model, Context R-CNN, to index into a long term memory bank constructed on a per-camera basis and aggregate contextual features from other frames to boost object detection performance on the current frame. We apply Context R-CNN to two settings: (1) species detection using camera traps, and (2) vehicle detection in traffic cameras, showing in both settings that Context R-CNN leads to performance gains over strong baselines. Moreover, we show that increasing the contextual time horizon leads to improved results. When applied to camera trap data from the Snapshot Serengeti dataset, Context R-CNN with context from up to a month of images outperforms a single-frame baseline by 17.9% mAP, and outperforms S3D (a 3d convolution based baseline) by 11.2% mAP.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 7, 2019

FemtoDet: An Object Detection Baseline for Energy Versus Performance Tradeoffs

Efficient detectors for edge devices are often optimized for parameters or speed count metrics, which remain in weak correlation with the energy of detectors. However, some vision applications of convolutional neural networks, such as always-on surveillance cameras, are critical for energy constraints. This paper aims to serve as a baseline by designing detectors to reach tradeoffs between energy and performance from two perspectives: 1) We extensively analyze various CNNs to identify low-energy architectures, including selecting activation functions, convolutions operators, and feature fusion structures on necks. These underappreciated details in past work seriously affect the energy consumption of detectors; 2) To break through the dilemmatic energy-performance problem, we propose a balanced detector driven by energy using discovered low-energy components named FemtoDet. In addition to the novel construction, we improve FemtoDet by considering convolutions and training strategy optimizations. Specifically, we develop a new instance boundary enhancement (IBE) module for convolution optimization to overcome the contradiction between the limited capacity of CNNs and detection tasks in diverse spatial representations, and propose a recursive warm-restart (RecWR) for optimizing training strategy to escape the sub-optimization of light-weight detectors by considering the data shift produced in popular augmentations. As a result, FemtoDet with only 68.77k parameters achieves a competitive score of 46.3 AP50 on PASCAL VOC and 1.11 W & 64.47 FPS on Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 CPU platforms. Extensive experiments on COCO and TJU-DHD datasets indicate that the proposed method achieves competitive results in diverse scenes.

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 17, 2023

Dispider: Enabling Video LLMs with Active Real-Time Interaction via Disentangled Perception, Decision, and Reaction

Active Real-time interaction with video LLMs introduces a new paradigm for human-computer interaction, where the model not only understands user intent but also responds while continuously processing streaming video on the fly. Unlike offline video LLMs, which analyze the entire video before answering questions, active real-time interaction requires three capabilities: 1) Perception: real-time video monitoring and interaction capturing. 2) Decision: raising proactive interaction in proper situations, 3) Reaction: continuous interaction with users. However, inherent conflicts exist among the desired capabilities. The Decision and Reaction require a contrary Perception scale and grain, and the autoregressive decoding blocks the real-time Perception and Decision during the Reaction. To unify the conflicted capabilities within a harmonious system, we present Dispider, a system that disentangles Perception, Decision, and Reaction. Dispider features a lightweight proactive streaming video processing module that tracks the video stream and identifies optimal moments for interaction. Once the interaction is triggered, an asynchronous interaction module provides detailed responses, while the processing module continues to monitor the video in the meantime. Our disentangled and asynchronous design ensures timely, contextually accurate, and computationally efficient responses, making Dispider ideal for active real-time interaction for long-duration video streams. Experiments show that Dispider not only maintains strong performance in conventional video QA tasks, but also significantly surpasses previous online models in streaming scenario responses, thereby validating the effectiveness of our architecture. The code and model are released at https://github.com/Mark12Ding/Dispider.

  • 8 authors
·
Jan 6 5

ApproxDet: Content and Contention-Aware Approximate Object Detection for Mobiles

Advanced video analytic systems, including scene classification and object detection, have seen widespread success in various domains such as smart cities and autonomous transportation. With an ever-growing number of powerful client devices, there is incentive to move these heavy video analytics workloads from the cloud to mobile devices to achieve low latency and real-time processing and to preserve user privacy. However, most video analytic systems are heavyweight and are trained offline with some pre-defined latency or accuracy requirements. This makes them unable to adapt at runtime in the face of three types of dynamism -- the input video characteristics change, the amount of compute resources available on the node changes due to co-located applications, and the user's latency-accuracy requirements change. In this paper we introduce ApproxDet, an adaptive video object detection framework for mobile devices to meet accuracy-latency requirements in the face of changing content and resource contention scenarios. To achieve this, we introduce a multi-branch object detection kernel (layered on Faster R-CNN), which incorporates a data-driven modeling approach on the performance metrics, and a latency SLA-driven scheduler to pick the best execution branch at runtime. We couple this kernel with approximable video object tracking algorithms to create an end-to-end video object detection system. We evaluate ApproxDet on a large benchmark video dataset and compare quantitatively to AdaScale and YOLOv3. We find that ApproxDet is able to adapt to a wide variety of contention and content characteristics and outshines all baselines, e.g., it achieves 52% lower latency and 11.1% higher accuracy over YOLOv3.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 21, 2020

PS-TTL: Prototype-based Soft-labels and Test-Time Learning for Few-shot Object Detection

In recent years, Few-Shot Object Detection (FSOD) has gained widespread attention and made significant progress due to its ability to build models with a good generalization power using extremely limited annotated data. The fine-tuning based paradigm is currently dominating this field, where detectors are initially pre-trained on base classes with sufficient samples and then fine-tuned on novel ones with few samples, but the scarcity of labeled samples of novel classes greatly interferes precisely fitting their data distribution, thus hampering the performance. To address this issue, we propose a new framework for FSOD, namely Prototype-based Soft-labels and Test-Time Learning (PS-TTL). Specifically, we design a Test-Time Learning (TTL) module that employs a mean-teacher network for self-training to discover novel instances from test data, allowing detectors to learn better representations and classifiers for novel classes. Furthermore, we notice that even though relatively low-confidence pseudo-labels exhibit classification confusion, they still tend to recall foreground. We thus develop a Prototype-based Soft-labels (PS) strategy through assessing similarities between low-confidence pseudo-labels and category prototypes as soft-labels to unleash their potential, which substantially mitigates the constraints posed by few-shot samples. Extensive experiments on both the VOC and COCO benchmarks show that PS-TTL achieves the state-of-the-art, highlighting its effectiveness. The code and model are available at https://github.com/gaoyingjay/PS-TTL.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 10, 2024

MTevent: A Multi-Task Event Camera Dataset for 6D Pose Estimation and Moving Object Detection

Mobile robots are reaching unprecedented speeds, with platforms like Unitree B2, and Fraunhofer O3dyn achieving maximum speeds between 5 and 10 m/s. However, effectively utilizing such speeds remains a challenge due to the limitations of RGB cameras, which suffer from motion blur and fail to provide real-time responsiveness. Event cameras, with their asynchronous operation, and low-latency sensing, offer a promising alternative for high-speed robotic perception. In this work, we introduce MTevent, a dataset designed for 6D pose estimation and moving object detection in highly dynamic environments with large detection distances. Our setup consists of a stereo-event camera and an RGB camera, capturing 75 scenes, each on average 16 seconds, and featuring 16 unique objects under challenging conditions such as extreme viewing angles, varying lighting, and occlusions. MTevent is the first dataset to combine high-speed motion, long-range perception, and real-world object interactions, making it a valuable resource for advancing event-based vision in robotics. To establish a baseline, we evaluate the task of 6D pose estimation using NVIDIA's FoundationPose on RGB images, achieving an Average Recall of 0.22 with ground-truth masks, highlighting the limitations of RGB-based approaches in such dynamic settings. With MTevent, we provide a novel resource to improve perception models and foster further research in high-speed robotic vision. The dataset is available for download https://huggingface.co/datasets/anas-gouda/MTevent

  • 6 authors
·
May 16

On Calibration of Object Detectors: Pitfalls, Evaluation and Baselines

Reliable usage of object detectors require them to be calibrated -- a crucial problem that requires careful attention. Recent approaches towards this involve (1) designing new loss functions to obtain calibrated detectors by training them from scratch, and (2) post-hoc Temperature Scaling (TS) that learns to scale the likelihood of a trained detector to output calibrated predictions. These approaches are then evaluated based on a combination of Detection Expected Calibration Error (D-ECE) and Average Precision. In this work, via extensive analysis and insights, we highlight that these recent evaluation frameworks, evaluation metrics, and the use of TS have notable drawbacks leading to incorrect conclusions. As a step towards fixing these issues, we propose a principled evaluation framework to jointly measure calibration and accuracy of object detectors. We also tailor efficient and easy-to-use post-hoc calibration approaches such as Platt Scaling and Isotonic Regression specifically for object detection task. Contrary to the common notion, our experiments show that once designed and evaluated properly, post-hoc calibrators, which are extremely cheap to build and use, are much more powerful and effective than the recent train-time calibration methods. To illustrate, D-DETR with our post-hoc Isotonic Regression calibrator outperforms the recent train-time state-of-the-art calibration method Cal-DETR by more than 7 D-ECE on the COCO dataset. Additionally, we propose improved versions of the recently proposed Localization-aware ECE and show the efficacy of our method on these metrics as well. Code is available at: https://github.com/fiveai/detection_calibration.

  • 4 authors
·
May 30, 2024

Object Detectors in the Open Environment: Challenges, Solutions, and Outlook

With the emergence of foundation models, deep learning-based object detectors have shown practical usability in closed set scenarios. However, for real-world tasks, object detectors often operate in open environments, where crucial factors (e.g., data distribution, objective) that influence model learning are often changing. The dynamic and intricate nature of the open environment poses novel and formidable challenges to object detectors. Unfortunately, current research on object detectors in open environments lacks a comprehensive analysis of their distinctive characteristics, challenges, and corresponding solutions, which hinders their secure deployment in critical real-world scenarios. This paper aims to bridge this gap by conducting a comprehensive review and analysis of object detectors in open environments. We initially identified limitations of key structural components within the existing detection pipeline and propose the open environment object detector challenge framework that includes four quadrants (i.e., out-of-domain, out-of-category, robust learning, and incremental learning) based on the dimensions of the data / target changes. For each quadrant of challenges in the proposed framework, we present a detailed description and systematic analysis of the overarching goals and core difficulties, systematically review the corresponding solutions, and benchmark their performance over multiple widely adopted datasets. In addition, we engage in a discussion of open problems and potential avenues for future research. This paper aims to provide a fresh, comprehensive, and systematic understanding of the challenges and solutions associated with open-environment object detectors, thus catalyzing the development of more solid applications in real-world scenarios. A project related to this survey can be found at https://github.com/LiangSiyuan21/OEOD_Survey.

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 24, 2024

YOLOv6: A Single-Stage Object Detection Framework for Industrial Applications

For years, the YOLO series has been the de facto industry-level standard for efficient object detection. The YOLO community has prospered overwhelmingly to enrich its use in a multitude of hardware platforms and abundant scenarios. In this technical report, we strive to push its limits to the next level, stepping forward with an unwavering mindset for industry application. Considering the diverse requirements for speed and accuracy in the real environment, we extensively examine the up-to-date object detection advancements either from industry or academia. Specifically, we heavily assimilate ideas from recent network design, training strategies, testing techniques, quantization, and optimization methods. On top of this, we integrate our thoughts and practice to build a suite of deployment-ready networks at various scales to accommodate diversified use cases. With the generous permission of YOLO authors, we name it YOLOv6. We also express our warm welcome to users and contributors for further enhancement. For a glimpse of performance, our YOLOv6-N hits 35.9% AP on the COCO dataset at a throughput of 1234 FPS on an NVIDIA Tesla T4 GPU. YOLOv6-S strikes 43.5% AP at 495 FPS, outperforming other mainstream detectors at the same scale~(YOLOv5-S, YOLOX-S, and PPYOLOE-S). Our quantized version of YOLOv6-S even brings a new state-of-the-art 43.3% AP at 869 FPS. Furthermore, YOLOv6-M/L also achieves better accuracy performance (i.e., 49.5%/52.3%) than other detectors with a similar inference speed. We carefully conducted experiments to validate the effectiveness of each component. Our code is made available at https://github.com/meituan/YOLOv6.

  • 18 authors
·
Sep 7, 2022

Feature Selective Anchor-Free Module for Single-Shot Object Detection

We motivate and present feature selective anchor-free (FSAF) module, a simple and effective building block for single-shot object detectors. It can be plugged into single-shot detectors with feature pyramid structure. The FSAF module addresses two limitations brought up by the conventional anchor-based detection: 1) heuristic-guided feature selection; 2) overlap-based anchor sampling. The general concept of the FSAF module is online feature selection applied to the training of multi-level anchor-free branches. Specifically, an anchor-free branch is attached to each level of the feature pyramid, allowing box encoding and decoding in the anchor-free manner at an arbitrary level. During training, we dynamically assign each instance to the most suitable feature level. At the time of inference, the FSAF module can work jointly with anchor-based branches by outputting predictions in parallel. We instantiate this concept with simple implementations of anchor-free branches and online feature selection strategy. Experimental results on the COCO detection track show that our FSAF module performs better than anchor-based counterparts while being faster. When working jointly with anchor-based branches, the FSAF module robustly improves the baseline RetinaNet by a large margin under various settings, while introducing nearly free inference overhead. And the resulting best model can achieve a state-of-the-art 44.6% mAP, outperforming all existing single-shot detectors on COCO.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 1, 2019

Beyond Few-shot Object Detection: A Detailed Survey

Object detection is a critical field in computer vision focusing on accurately identifying and locating specific objects in images or videos. Traditional methods for object detection rely on large labeled training datasets for each object category, which can be time-consuming and expensive to collect and annotate. To address this issue, researchers have introduced few-shot object detection (FSOD) approaches that merge few-shot learning and object detection principles. These approaches allow models to quickly adapt to new object categories with only a few annotated samples. While traditional FSOD methods have been studied before, this survey paper comprehensively reviews FSOD research with a specific focus on covering different FSOD settings such as standard FSOD, generalized FSOD, incremental FSOD, open-set FSOD, and domain adaptive FSOD. These approaches play a vital role in reducing the reliance on extensive labeled datasets, particularly as the need for efficient machine learning models continues to rise. This survey paper aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the above-mentioned few-shot settings and explore the methodologies for each FSOD task. It thoroughly compares state-of-the-art methods across different FSOD settings, analyzing them in detail based on their evaluation protocols. Additionally, it offers insights into their applications, challenges, and potential future directions in the evolving field of object detection with limited data.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 26, 2024

Towards Surveillance Video-and-Language Understanding: New Dataset, Baselines, and Challenges

Surveillance videos are an essential component of daily life with various critical applications, particularly in public security. However, current surveillance video tasks mainly focus on classifying and localizing anomalous events. Existing methods are limited to detecting and classifying the predefined events with unsatisfactory semantic understanding, although they have obtained considerable performance. To address this issue, we propose a new research direction of surveillance video-and-language understanding, and construct the first multimodal surveillance video dataset. We manually annotate the real-world surveillance dataset UCF-Crime with fine-grained event content and timing. Our newly annotated dataset, UCA (UCF-Crime Annotation), contains 23,542 sentences, with an average length of 20 words, and its annotated videos are as long as 110.7 hours. Furthermore, we benchmark SOTA models for four multimodal tasks on this newly created dataset, which serve as new baselines for surveillance video-and-language understanding. Through our experiments, we find that mainstream models used in previously publicly available datasets perform poorly on surveillance video, which demonstrates the new challenges in surveillance video-and-language understanding. To validate the effectiveness of our UCA, we conducted experiments on multimodal anomaly detection. The results demonstrate that our multimodal surveillance learning can improve the performance of conventional anomaly detection tasks. All the experiments highlight the necessity of constructing this dataset to advance surveillance AI. The link to our dataset is provided at: https://xuange923.github.io/Surveillance-Video-Understanding.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 25, 2023

Detecting Line Segments in Motion-blurred Images with Events

Making line segment detectors more reliable under motion blurs is one of the most important challenges for practical applications, such as visual SLAM and 3D reconstruction. Existing line segment detection methods face severe performance degradation for accurately detecting and locating line segments when motion blur occurs. While event data shows strong complementary characteristics to images for minimal blur and edge awareness at high-temporal resolution, potentially beneficial for reliable line segment recognition. To robustly detect line segments over motion blurs, we propose to leverage the complementary information of images and events. To achieve this, we first design a general frame-event feature fusion network to extract and fuse the detailed image textures and low-latency event edges, which consists of a channel-attention-based shallow fusion module and a self-attention-based dual hourglass module. We then utilize two state-of-the-art wireframe parsing networks to detect line segments on the fused feature map. Besides, we contribute a synthetic and a realistic dataset for line segment detection, i.e., FE-Wireframe and FE-Blurframe, with pairwise motion-blurred images and events. Extensive experiments on both datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. When tested on the real dataset, our method achieves 63.3% mean structural average precision (msAP) with the model pre-trained on the FE-Wireframe and fine-tuned on the FE-Blurframe, improved by 32.6 and 11.3 points compared with models trained on synthetic only and real only, respectively. The codes, datasets, and trained models are released at: https://levenberg.github.io/FE-LSD

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 14, 2022

Automatically identifying, counting, and describing wild animals in camera-trap images with deep learning

Having accurate, detailed, and up-to-date information about the location and behavior of animals in the wild would revolutionize our ability to study and conserve ecosystems. We investigate the ability to automatically, accurately, and inexpensively collect such data, which could transform many fields of biology, ecology, and zoology into "big data" sciences. Motion sensor "camera traps" enable collecting wildlife pictures inexpensively, unobtrusively, and frequently. However, extracting information from these pictures remains an expensive, time-consuming, manual task. We demonstrate that such information can be automatically extracted by deep learning, a cutting-edge type of artificial intelligence. We train deep convolutional neural networks to identify, count, and describe the behaviors of 48 species in the 3.2-million-image Snapshot Serengeti dataset. Our deep neural networks automatically identify animals with over 93.8% accuracy, and we expect that number to improve rapidly in years to come. More importantly, if our system classifies only images it is confident about, our system can automate animal identification for 99.3% of the data while still performing at the same 96.6% accuracy as that of crowdsourced teams of human volunteers, saving more than 8.4 years (at 40 hours per week) of human labeling effort (i.e. over 17,000 hours) on this 3.2-million-image dataset. Those efficiency gains immediately highlight the importance of using deep neural networks to automate data extraction from camera-trap images. Our results suggest that this technology could enable the inexpensive, unobtrusive, high-volume, and even real-time collection of a wealth of information about vast numbers of animals in the wild.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 16, 2017

Temporal Enhanced Training of Multi-view 3D Object Detector via Historical Object Prediction

In this paper, we propose a new paradigm, named Historical Object Prediction (HoP) for multi-view 3D detection to leverage temporal information more effectively. The HoP approach is straightforward: given the current timestamp t, we generate a pseudo Bird's-Eye View (BEV) feature of timestamp t-k from its adjacent frames and utilize this feature to predict the object set at timestamp t-k. Our approach is motivated by the observation that enforcing the detector to capture both the spatial location and temporal motion of objects occurring at historical timestamps can lead to more accurate BEV feature learning. First, we elaborately design short-term and long-term temporal decoders, which can generate the pseudo BEV feature for timestamp t-k without the involvement of its corresponding camera images. Second, an additional object decoder is flexibly attached to predict the object targets using the generated pseudo BEV feature. Note that we only perform HoP during training, thus the proposed method does not introduce extra overheads during inference. As a plug-and-play approach, HoP can be easily incorporated into state-of-the-art BEV detection frameworks, including BEVFormer and BEVDet series. Furthermore, the auxiliary HoP approach is complementary to prevalent temporal modeling methods, leading to significant performance gains. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed HoP on the nuScenes dataset. We choose the representative methods, including BEVFormer and BEVDet4D-Depth to evaluate our method. Surprisingly, HoP achieves 68.5% NDS and 62.4% mAP with ViT-L on nuScenes test, outperforming all the 3D object detectors on the leaderboard. Codes will be available at https://github.com/Sense-X/HoP.

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 3, 2023

YOLOv10: Real-Time End-to-End Object Detection

Over the past years, YOLOs have emerged as the predominant paradigm in the field of real-time object detection owing to their effective balance between computational cost and detection performance. Researchers have explored the architectural designs, optimization objectives, data augmentation strategies, and others for YOLOs, achieving notable progress. However, the reliance on the non-maximum suppression (NMS) for post-processing hampers the end-to-end deployment of YOLOs and adversely impacts the inference latency. Besides, the design of various components in YOLOs lacks the comprehensive and thorough inspection, resulting in noticeable computational redundancy and limiting the model's capability. It renders the suboptimal efficiency, along with considerable potential for performance improvements. In this work, we aim to further advance the performance-efficiency boundary of YOLOs from both the post-processing and model architecture. To this end, we first present the consistent dual assignments for NMS-free training of YOLOs, which brings competitive performance and low inference latency simultaneously. Moreover, we introduce the holistic efficiency-accuracy driven model design strategy for YOLOs. We comprehensively optimize various components of YOLOs from both efficiency and accuracy perspectives, which greatly reduces the computational overhead and enhances the capability. The outcome of our effort is a new generation of YOLO series for real-time end-to-end object detection, dubbed YOLOv10. Extensive experiments show that YOLOv10 achieves state-of-the-art performance and efficiency across various model scales. For example, our YOLOv10-S is 1.8times faster than RT-DETR-R18 under the similar AP on COCO, meanwhile enjoying 2.8times smaller number of parameters and FLOPs. Compared with YOLOv9-C, YOLOv10-B has 46\% less latency and 25\% fewer parameters for the same performance.

  • 7 authors
·
May 23, 2024

CoDeNet: Efficient Deployment of Input-Adaptive Object Detection on Embedded FPGAs

Deploying deep learning models on embedded systems has been challenging due to limited computing resources. The majority of existing work focuses on accelerating image classification, while other fundamental vision problems, such as object detection, have not been adequately addressed. Compared with image classification, detection problems are more sensitive to the spatial variance of objects, and therefore, require specialized convolutions to aggregate spatial information. To address this need, recent work introduces dynamic deformable convolution to augment regular convolutions. However, this will lead to inefficient memory accesses of inputs with existing hardware. In this work, we harness the flexibility of FPGAs to develop a novel object detection pipeline with deformable convolutions. We show the speed-accuracy tradeoffs for a set of algorithm modifications including irregular-access versus limited-range and fixed-shape. We then Co-Design a Network CoDeNet with the modified deformable convolution and quantize it to 4-bit weights and 8-bit activations. With our high-efficiency implementation, our solution reaches 26.9 frames per second with a tiny model size of 0.76 MB while achieving 61.7 AP50 on the standard object detection dataset, Pascal VOC. With our higher accuracy implementation, our model gets to 67.1 AP50 on Pascal VOC with only 2.9 MB of parameters-20.9x smaller but 10% more accurate than Tiny-YOLO.

  • 9 authors
·
Jun 12, 2020

Semi-supervised Active Learning for Video Action Detection

In this work, we focus on label efficient learning for video action detection. We develop a novel semi-supervised active learning approach which utilizes both labeled as well as unlabeled data along with informative sample selection for action detection. Video action detection requires spatio-temporal localization along with classification, which poses several challenges for both active learning informative sample selection as well as semi-supervised learning pseudo label generation. First, we propose NoiseAug, a simple augmentation strategy which effectively selects informative samples for video action detection. Next, we propose fft-attention, a novel technique based on high-pass filtering which enables effective utilization of pseudo label for SSL in video action detection by emphasizing on relevant activity region within a video. We evaluate the proposed approach on three different benchmark datasets, UCF-101-24, JHMDB-21, and Youtube-VOS. First, we demonstrate its effectiveness on video action detection where the proposed approach outperforms prior works in semi-supervised and weakly-supervised learning along with several baseline approaches in both UCF101-24 and JHMDB-21. Next, we also show its effectiveness on Youtube-VOS for video object segmentation demonstrating its generalization capability for other dense prediction tasks in videos. The code and models is publicly available at: https://github.com/AKASH2907/semi-sup-active-learning.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 12, 2023

RelationNet++: Bridging Visual Representations for Object Detection via Transformer Decoder

Existing object detection frameworks are usually built on a single format of object/part representation, i.e., anchor/proposal rectangle boxes in RetinaNet and Faster R-CNN, center points in FCOS and RepPoints, and corner points in CornerNet. While these different representations usually drive the frameworks to perform well in different aspects, e.g., better classification or finer localization, it is in general difficult to combine these representations in a single framework to make good use of each strength, due to the heterogeneous or non-grid feature extraction by different representations. This paper presents an attention-based decoder module similar as that in Transformer~vaswani2017attention to bridge other representations into a typical object detector built on a single representation format, in an end-to-end fashion. The other representations act as a set of key instances to strengthen the main query representation features in the vanilla detectors. Novel techniques are proposed towards efficient computation of the decoder module, including a key sampling approach and a shared location embedding approach. The proposed module is named bridging visual representations (BVR). It can perform in-place and we demonstrate its broad effectiveness in bridging other representations into prevalent object detection frameworks, including RetinaNet, Faster R-CNN, FCOS and ATSS, where about 1.5sim3.0 AP improvements are achieved. In particular, we improve a state-of-the-art framework with a strong backbone by about 2.0 AP, reaching 52.7 AP on COCO test-dev. The resulting network is named RelationNet++. The code will be available at https://github.com/microsoft/RelationNet2.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 29, 2020

CASA: Class-Agnostic Shared Attributes in Vision-Language Models for Efficient Incremental Object Detection

Incremental object detection (IOD) is challenged by background shift, where background categories in sequential data may include previously learned or future classes. Inspired by the vision-language foundation models such as CLIP, these models capture shared attributes from extensive image-text paired data during pre-training. We propose a novel method utilizing attributes in vision-language foundation models for incremental object detection. Our method constructs a Class-Agnostic Shared Attribute base (CASA) to capture common semantic information among incremental classes. Specifically, we utilize large language models to generate candidate textual attributes and select the most relevant ones based on current training data, recording their significance in an attribute assignment matrix. For subsequent tasks, we freeze the retained attributes and continue selecting from the remaining candidates while updating the attribute assignment matrix accordingly. Furthermore, we employ OWL-ViT as our baseline, preserving the original parameters of the pre-trained foundation model. Our method adds only 0.7% to parameter storage through parameter-efficient fine-tuning to significantly enhance the scalability and adaptability of IOD. Extensive two-phase and multi-phase experiments on the COCO dataset demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our proposed method.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 8, 2024

FastDepth: Fast Monocular Depth Estimation on Embedded Systems

Depth sensing is a critical function for robotic tasks such as localization, mapping and obstacle detection. There has been a significant and growing interest in depth estimation from a single RGB image, due to the relatively low cost and size of monocular cameras. However, state-of-the-art single-view depth estimation algorithms are based on fairly complex deep neural networks that are too slow for real-time inference on an embedded platform, for instance, mounted on a micro aerial vehicle. In this paper, we address the problem of fast depth estimation on embedded systems. We propose an efficient and lightweight encoder-decoder network architecture and apply network pruning to further reduce computational complexity and latency. In particular, we focus on the design of a low-latency decoder. Our methodology demonstrates that it is possible to achieve similar accuracy as prior work on depth estimation, but at inference speeds that are an order of magnitude faster. Our proposed network, FastDepth, runs at 178 fps on an NVIDIA Jetson TX2 GPU and at 27 fps when using only the TX2 CPU, with active power consumption under 10 W. FastDepth achieves close to state-of-the-art accuracy on the NYU Depth v2 dataset. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this paper demonstrates real-time monocular depth estimation using a deep neural network with the lowest latency and highest throughput on an embedded platform that can be carried by a micro aerial vehicle.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 7, 2019

A Little Bit Attention Is All You Need for Person Re-Identification

Person re-identification plays a key role in applications where a mobile robot needs to track its users over a long period of time, even if they are partially unobserved for some time, in order to follow them or be available on demand. In this context, deep-learning based real-time feature extraction on a mobile robot is often performed on special-purpose devices whose computational resources are shared for multiple tasks. Therefore, the inference speed has to be taken into account. In contrast, person re-identification is often improved by architectural changes that come at the cost of significantly slowing down inference. Attention blocks are one such example. We will show that some well-performing attention blocks used in the state of the art are subject to inference costs that are far too high to justify their use for mobile robotic applications. As a consequence, we propose an attention block that only slightly affects the inference speed while keeping up with much deeper networks or more complex attention blocks in terms of re-identification accuracy. We perform extensive neural architecture search to derive rules at which locations this attention block should be integrated into the architecture in order to achieve the best trade-off between speed and accuracy. Finally, we confirm that the best performing configuration on a re-identification benchmark also performs well on an indoor robotic dataset.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 28, 2023

Object Detection with Multimodal Large Vision-Language Models: An In-depth Review

The fusion of language and vision in large vision-language models (LVLMs) has revolutionized deep learning-based object detection by enhancing adaptability, contextual reasoning, and generalization beyond traditional architectures. This in-depth review presents a structured exploration of the state-of-the-art in LVLMs, systematically organized through a three-step research review process. First, we discuss the functioning of vision language models (VLMs) for object detection, describing how these models harness natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV) techniques to revolutionize object detection and localization. We then explain the architectural innovations, training paradigms, and output flexibility of recent LVLMs for object detection, highlighting how they achieve advanced contextual understanding for object detection. The review thoroughly examines the approaches used in integration of visual and textual information, demonstrating the progress made in object detection using VLMs that facilitate more sophisticated object detection and localization strategies. This review presents comprehensive visualizations demonstrating LVLMs' effectiveness in diverse scenarios including localization and segmentation, and then compares their real-time performance, adaptability, and complexity to traditional deep learning systems. Based on the review, its is expected that LVLMs will soon meet or surpass the performance of conventional methods in object detection. The review also identifies a few major limitations of the current LVLM modes, proposes solutions to address those challenges, and presents a clear roadmap for the future advancement in this field. We conclude, based on this study, that the recent advancement in LVLMs have made and will continue to make a transformative impact on object detection and robotic applications in the future.

  • 2 authors
·
Aug 25

Algorithm-hardware Co-design for Deformable Convolution

FPGAs provide a flexible and efficient platform to accelerate rapidly-changing algorithms for computer vision. The majority of existing work focuses on accelerating image classification, while other fundamental vision problems, including object detection and instance segmentation, have not been adequately addressed. Compared with image classification, detection problems are more sensitive to the spatial variance of objects, and therefore, require specialized convolutions to aggregate spatial information. To address this, recent work proposes dynamic deformable convolution to augment regular convolutions. Regular convolutions process a fixed grid of pixels across all the spatial locations in an image, while dynamic deformable convolutions may access arbitrary pixels in the image and the access pattern is input-dependent and varies per spatial location. These properties lead to inefficient memory accesses of inputs with existing hardware. In this work, we first investigate the overhead of the deformable convolution on embedded FPGA SoCs, and then show the accuracy-latency tradeoffs for a set of algorithm modifications including full versus depthwise, fixed-shape, and limited-range. These modifications benefit the energy efficiency for embedded devices in general as they reduce the compute complexity. We then build an efficient object detection network with modified deformable convolutions and quantize the network using state-of-the-art quantization methods. We implement a unified hardware engine on FPGA to support all the operations in the network. Preliminary experiments show that little accuracy is compromised and speedup can be achieved with our co-design optimization for the deformable convolution.

  • 8 authors
·
Feb 18, 2020

EfficientAD: Accurate Visual Anomaly Detection at Millisecond-Level Latencies

Detecting anomalies in images is an important task, especially in real-time computer vision applications. In this work, we focus on computational efficiency and propose a lightweight feature extractor that processes an image in less than a millisecond on a modern GPU. We then use a student-teacher approach to detect anomalous features. We train a student network to predict the extracted features of normal, i.e., anomaly-free training images. The detection of anomalies at test time is enabled by the student failing to predict their features. We propose a training loss that hinders the student from imitating the teacher feature extractor beyond the normal images. It allows us to drastically reduce the computational cost of the student-teacher model, while improving the detection of anomalous features. We furthermore address the detection of challenging logical anomalies that involve invalid combinations of normal local features, for example, a wrong ordering of objects. We detect these anomalies by efficiently incorporating an autoencoder that analyzes images globally. We evaluate our method, called EfficientAD, on 32 datasets from three industrial anomaly detection dataset collections. EfficientAD sets new standards for both the detection and the localization of anomalies. At a latency of two milliseconds and a throughput of six hundred images per second, it enables a fast handling of anomalies. Together with its low error rate, this makes it an economical solution for real-world applications and a fruitful basis for future research.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 25, 2023

Convolutional Transformer based Dual Discriminator Generative Adversarial Networks for Video Anomaly Detection

Detecting abnormal activities in real-world surveillance videos is an important yet challenging task as the prior knowledge about video anomalies is usually limited or unavailable. Despite that many approaches have been developed to resolve this problem, few of them can capture the normal spatio-temporal patterns effectively and efficiently. Moreover, existing works seldom explicitly consider the local consistency at frame level and global coherence of temporal dynamics in video sequences. To this end, we propose Convolutional Transformer based Dual Discriminator Generative Adversarial Networks (CT-D2GAN) to perform unsupervised video anomaly detection. Specifically, we first present a convolutional transformer to perform future frame prediction. It contains three key components, i.e., a convolutional encoder to capture the spatial information of the input video clips, a temporal self-attention module to encode the temporal dynamics, and a convolutional decoder to integrate spatio-temporal features and predict the future frame. Next, a dual discriminator based adversarial training procedure, which jointly considers an image discriminator that can maintain the local consistency at frame-level and a video discriminator that can enforce the global coherence of temporal dynamics, is employed to enhance the future frame prediction. Finally, the prediction error is used to identify abnormal video frames. Thoroughly empirical studies on three public video anomaly detection datasets, i.e., UCSD Ped2, CUHK Avenue, and Shanghai Tech Campus, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed adversarial spatio-temporal modeling framework.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 28, 2021

Chasing Day and Night: Towards Robust and Efficient All-Day Object Detection Guided by an Event Camera

The ability to detect objects in all lighting (i.e., normal-, over-, and under-exposed) conditions is crucial for real-world applications, such as self-driving.Traditional RGB-based detectors often fail under such varying lighting conditions.Therefore, recent works utilize novel event cameras to supplement or guide the RGB modality; however, these methods typically adopt asymmetric network structures that rely predominantly on the RGB modality, resulting in limited robustness for all-day detection. In this paper, we propose EOLO, a novel object detection framework that achieves robust and efficient all-day detection by fusing both RGB and event modalities. Our EOLO framework is built based on a lightweight spiking neural network (SNN) to efficiently leverage the asynchronous property of events. Buttressed by it, we first introduce an Event Temporal Attention (ETA) module to learn the high temporal information from events while preserving crucial edge information. Secondly, as different modalities exhibit varying levels of importance under diverse lighting conditions, we propose a novel Symmetric RGB-Event Fusion (SREF) module to effectively fuse RGB-Event features without relying on a specific modality, thus ensuring a balanced and adaptive fusion for all-day detection. In addition, to compensate for the lack of paired RGB-Event datasets for all-day training and evaluation, we propose an event synthesis approach based on the randomized optical flow that allows for directly generating the event frame from a single exposure image. We further build two new datasets, E-MSCOCO and E-VOC based on the popular benchmarks MSCOCO and PASCAL VOC. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our EOLO outperforms the state-of-the-art detectors,e.g.,RENet,by a substantial margin (+3.74% mAP50) in all lighting conditions.Our code and datasets will be available at https://vlislab22.github.io/EOLO/

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 17, 2023

LaSOT: A High-quality Large-scale Single Object Tracking Benchmark

Despite great recent advances in visual tracking, its further development, including both algorithm design and evaluation, is limited due to lack of dedicated large-scale benchmarks. To address this problem, we present LaSOT, a high-quality Large-scale Single Object Tracking benchmark. LaSOT contains a diverse selection of 85 object classes, and offers 1,550 totaling more than 3.87 million frames. Each video frame is carefully and manually annotated with a bounding box. This makes LaSOT, to our knowledge, the largest densely annotated tracking benchmark. Our goal in releasing LaSOT is to provide a dedicated high quality platform for both training and evaluation of trackers. The average video length of LaSOT is around 2,500 frames, where each video contains various challenge factors that exist in real world video footage,such as the targets disappearing and re-appearing. These longer video lengths allow for the assessment of long-term trackers. To take advantage of the close connection between visual appearance and natural language, we provide language specification for each video in LaSOT. We believe such additions will allow for future research to use linguistic features to improve tracking. Two protocols, full-overlap and one-shot, are designated for flexible assessment of trackers. We extensively evaluate 48 baseline trackers on LaSOT with in-depth analysis, and results reveal that there still exists significant room for improvement. The complete benchmark, tracking results as well as analysis are available at http://vision.cs.stonybrook.edu/~lasot/.

  • 14 authors
·
Sep 7, 2020

PVT++: A Simple End-to-End Latency-Aware Visual Tracking Framework

Visual object tracking is essential to intelligent robots. Most existing approaches have ignored the online latency that can cause severe performance degradation during real-world processing. Especially for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), where robust tracking is more challenging and onboard computation is limited, the latency issue can be fatal. In this work, we present a simple framework for end-to-end latency-aware tracking, i.e., end-to-end predictive visual tracking (PVT++). Unlike existing solutions that naively append Kalman Filters after trackers, PVT++ can be jointly optimized, so that it takes not only motion information but can also leverage the rich visual knowledge in most pre-trained tracker models for robust prediction. Besides, to bridge the training-evaluation domain gap, we propose a relative motion factor, empowering PVT++ to generalize to the challenging and complex UAV tracking scenes. These careful designs have made the small-capacity lightweight PVT++ a widely effective solution. Additionally, this work presents an extended latency-aware evaluation benchmark for assessing an any-speed tracker in the online setting. Empirical results on a robotic platform from the aerial perspective show that PVT++ can achieve significant performance gain on various trackers and exhibit higher accuracy than prior solutions, largely mitigating the degradation brought by latency.

  • 7 authors
·
Nov 21, 2022

Ultralytics YOLO Evolution: An Overview of YOLO26, YOLO11, YOLOv8 and YOLOv5 Object Detectors for Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

This paper presents a comprehensive overview of the Ultralytics YOLO(You Only Look Once) family of object detectors, focusing the architectural evolution, benchmarking, deployment perspectives, and future challenges. The review begins with the most recent release, YOLO26 (YOLOv26), which introduces key innovations including Distribution Focal Loss (DFL) removal, native NMS-free inference, Progressive Loss Balancing (ProgLoss), Small-Target-Aware Label Assignment (STAL), and the MuSGD optimizer for stable training. The progression is then traced through YOLO11, with its hybrid task assignment and efficiency-focused modules; YOLOv8, which advanced with a decoupled detection head and anchor-free predictions; and YOLOv5, which established the modular PyTorch foundation that enabled modern YOLO development. Benchmarking on the MS COCO dataset provides a detailed quantitative comparison of YOLOv5, YOLOv8, YOLO11, and YOLO26, alongside cross-comparisons with YOLOv12, YOLOv13, RT-DETR, and DEIM. Metrics including precision, recall, F1 score, mean Average Precision, and inference speed are analyzed to highlight trade-offs between accuracy and efficiency. Deployment and application perspectives are further discussed, covering export formats, quantization strategies, and real-world use in robotics, agriculture, surveillance, and manufacturing. Finally, the paper identifies challenges and future directions, including dense-scene limitations, hybrid CNN-Transformer integration, open-vocabulary detection, and edge-aware training approaches.

  • 2 authors
·
Oct 6

DAMO-StreamNet: Optimizing Streaming Perception in Autonomous Driving

Real-time perception, or streaming perception, is a crucial aspect of autonomous driving that has yet to be thoroughly explored in existing research. To address this gap, we present DAMO-StreamNet, an optimized framework that combines recent advances from the YOLO series with a comprehensive analysis of spatial and temporal perception mechanisms, delivering a cutting-edge solution. The key innovations of DAMO-StreamNet are (1) A robust neck structure incorporating deformable convolution, enhancing the receptive field and feature alignment capabilities (2) A dual-branch structure that integrates short-path semantic features and long-path temporal features, improving motion state prediction accuracy. (3) Logits-level distillation for efficient optimization, aligning the logits of teacher and student networks in semantic space. (4) A real-time forecasting mechanism that updates support frame features with the current frame, ensuring seamless streaming perception during inference. Our experiments demonstrate that DAMO-StreamNet surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods, achieving 37.8% (normal size (600, 960)) and 43.3% (large size (1200, 1920)) sAP without using extra data. This work not only sets a new benchmark for real-time perception but also provides valuable insights for future research. Additionally, DAMO-StreamNet can be applied to various autonomous systems, such as drones and robots, paving the way for real-time perception. The code is at https://github.com/zhiqic/DAMO-StreamNet.

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 30, 2023

ResidualViT for Efficient Temporally Dense Video Encoding

Several video understanding tasks, such as natural language temporal video grounding, temporal activity localization, and audio description generation, require "temporally dense" reasoning over frames sampled at high temporal resolution. However, computing frame-level features for these tasks is computationally expensive given the temporal resolution requirements. In this paper, we make three contributions to reduce the cost of computing features for temporally dense tasks. First, we introduce a vision transformer (ViT) architecture, dubbed ResidualViT, that leverages the large temporal redundancy in videos to efficiently compute temporally dense frame-level features. Our architecture incorporates (i) learnable residual connections that ensure temporal consistency across consecutive frames and (ii) a token reduction module that enhances processing speed by selectively discarding temporally redundant information while reusing weights of a pretrained foundation model. Second, we propose a lightweight distillation strategy to approximate the frame-level features of the original foundation model. Finally, we evaluate our approach across four tasks and five datasets, in both zero-shot and fully supervised settings, demonstrating significant reductions in computational cost (up to 60%) and improvements in inference speed (up to 2.5x faster), all while closely approximating the accuracy of the original foundation model.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 16

XS-VID: An Extremely Small Video Object Detection Dataset

Small Video Object Detection (SVOD) is a crucial subfield in modern computer vision, essential for early object discovery and detection. However, existing SVOD datasets are scarce and suffer from issues such as insufficiently small objects, limited object categories, and lack of scene diversity, leading to unitary application scenarios for corresponding methods. To address this gap, we develop the XS-VID dataset, which comprises aerial data from various periods and scenes, and annotates eight major object categories. To further evaluate existing methods for detecting extremely small objects, XS-VID extensively collects three types of objects with smaller pixel areas: extremely small (es, 0sim12^2), relatively small (rs, 12^2sim20^2), and generally small (gs, 20^2sim32^2). XS-VID offers unprecedented breadth and depth in covering and quantifying minuscule objects, significantly enriching the scene and object diversity in the dataset. Extensive validations on XS-VID and the publicly available VisDrone2019VID dataset show that existing methods struggle with small object detection and significantly underperform compared to general object detectors. Leveraging the strengths of previous methods and addressing their weaknesses, we propose YOLOFT, which enhances local feature associations and integrates temporal motion features, significantly improving the accuracy and stability of SVOD. Our datasets and benchmarks are available at https://gjhhust.github.io/XS-VID/.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 25, 2024

Exploring Temporally-Aware Features for Point Tracking

Point tracking in videos is a fundamental task with applications in robotics, video editing, and more. While many vision tasks benefit from pre-trained feature backbones to improve generalizability, point tracking has primarily relied on simpler backbones trained from scratch on synthetic data, which may limit robustness in real-world scenarios. Additionally, point tracking requires temporal awareness to ensure coherence across frames, but using temporally-aware features is still underexplored. Most current methods often employ a two-stage process: an initial coarse prediction followed by a refinement stage to inject temporal information and correct errors from the coarse stage. These approach, however, is computationally expensive and potentially redundant if the feature backbone itself captures sufficient temporal information. In this work, we introduce Chrono, a feature backbone specifically designed for point tracking with built-in temporal awareness. Leveraging pre-trained representations from self-supervised learner DINOv2 and enhanced with a temporal adapter, Chrono effectively captures long-term temporal context, enabling precise prediction even without the refinement stage. Experimental results demonstrate that Chrono achieves state-of-the-art performance in a refiner-free setting on the TAP-Vid-DAVIS and TAP-Vid-Kinetics datasets, among common feature backbones used in point tracking as well as DINOv2, with exceptional efficiency. Project page: https://cvlab-kaist.github.io/Chrono/

  • 6 authors
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Jan 21