Language-Driven Active Learning for Diverse Open-Set 3D Object Detection

Object detection is crucial for ensuring safe autonomous driving. However, data-driven approaches face challenges when encountering minority or novel objects in the 3D driving scene. In this paper, we propose VisLED, a language-driven active learning framework for diverse open-set 3D Object Detection. Our method leverages active learning techniques to query diverse and informative data samples from an unlabeled pool, enhancing the model's ability to detect underrepresented or novel objects. Specifically, we introduce the Vision-Language Embedding Diversity Querying (VisLED-Querying) algorithm, which operates in both open-world exploring and closed-world mining settings. In open-world exploring, VisLED-Querying selects data points most novel relative to existing data, while in closed-world mining, it mines new instances of known classes. We evaluate our approach on the nuScenes dataset and demonstrate its effectiveness compared to random sampling and entropy-querying methods. Our results show that VisLED-Querying consistently outperforms random sampling and offers competitive performance compared to entropy-querying despite the latter's model-optimality, highlighting the potential of VisLED for improving object detection in autonomous driving scenarios.

Overcoming Scene Context Constraints for Object Detection in wild using Defilters

This paper focuses on improving object detection performance by addressing the issue of image distortions, commonly encountered in uncontrolled acquisition environments. High-level computer vision tasks such as object detection, recognition, and segmentation are particularly sensitive to image distortion. To address this issue, we propose a novel approach employing an image defilter to rectify image distortion prior to object detection. This method enhances object detection accuracy, as models perform optimally when trained on non-distorted images. Our experiments demonstrate that utilizing defiltered images significantly improves mean average precision compared to training object detection models on distorted images. Consequently, our proposed method offers considerable benefits for real-world applications plagued by image distortion. To our knowledge, the contribution lies in employing distortion-removal paradigm for object detection on images captured in natural settings. We achieved an improvement of 0.562 and 0.564 of mean Average precision on validation and test data.

Coreset Selection for Object Detection

Coreset selection is a method for selecting a small, representative subset of an entire dataset. It has been primarily researched in image classification, assuming there is only one object per image. However, coreset selection for object detection is more challenging as an image can contain multiple objects. As a result, much research has yet to be done on this topic. Therefore, we introduce a new approach, Coreset Selection for Object Detection (CSOD). CSOD generates imagewise and classwise representative feature vectors for multiple objects of the same class within each image. Subsequently, we adopt submodular optimization for considering both representativeness and diversity and utilize the representative vectors in the submodular optimization process to select a subset. When we evaluated CSOD on the Pascal VOC dataset, CSOD outperformed random selection by +6.4%p in AP$_{50}$ when selecting 200 images.

OSR-ViT: A Simple and Modular Framework for Open-Set Object Detection and Discovery

An object detector's ability to detect and flag \textit{novel} objects during open-world deployments is critical for many real-world applications. Unfortunately, much of the work in open object detection today is disjointed and fails to adequately address applications that prioritize unknown object recall \textit{in addition to} known-class accuracy. To close this gap, we present a new task called Open-Set Object Detection and Discovery (OSODD) and as a solution propose the Open-Set Regions with ViT features (OSR-ViT) detection framework. OSR-ViT combines a class-agnostic proposal network with a powerful ViT-based classifier. Its modular design simplifies optimization and allows users to easily swap proposal solutions and feature extractors to best suit their application. Using our multifaceted evaluation protocol, we show that OSR-ViT obtains performance levels that far exceed state-of-the-art supervised methods. Our method also excels in low-data settings, outperforming supervised baselines using a fraction of the training data.

Multimodal 3D Object Detection on Unseen Domains

LiDAR datasets for autonomous driving exhibit biases in properties such as point cloud density, range, and object dimensions. As a result, object detection networks trained and evaluated in different environments often experience performance degradation. Domain adaptation approaches assume access to unannotated samples from the test distribution to address this problem. However, in the real world, the exact conditions of deployment and access to samples representative of the test dataset may be unavailable while training. We argue that the more realistic and challenging formulation is to require robustness in performance to unseen target domains. We propose to address this problem in a two-pronged manner. First, we leverage paired LiDAR-image data present in most autonomous driving datasets to perform multimodal object detection. We suggest that working with multimodal features by leveraging both images and LiDAR point clouds for scene understanding tasks results in object detectors more robust to unseen domain shifts. Second, we train a 3D object detector to learn multimodal object features across different distributions and promote feature invariance across these source domains to improve generalizability to unseen target domains. To this end, we propose CLIX$^\text{3D}$, a multimodal fusion and supervised contrastive learning framework for 3D object detection that performs alignment of object features from same-class samples of different domains while pushing the features from different classes apart. We show that CLIX$^\text{3D}$ yields state-of-the-art domain generalization performance under multiple dataset shifts.

Run-time Monitoring of 3D Object Detection in Automated Driving Systems Using Early Layer Neural Activation Patterns

Monitoring the integrity of object detection for errors within the perception module of automated driving systems (ADS) is paramount for ensuring safety. Despite recent advancements in deep neural network (DNN)-based object detectors, their susceptibility to detection errors, particularly in the less-explored realm of 3D object detection, remains a significant concern. State-of-the-art integrity monitoring (also known as introspection) mechanisms in 2D object detection mainly utilise the activation patterns in the final layer of the DNN-based detector's backbone. However, that may not sufficiently address the complexities and sparsity of data in 3D object detection. To this end, we conduct, in this article, an extensive investigation into the effects of activation patterns extracted from various layers of the backbone network for introspecting the operation of 3D object detectors. Through a comparative analysis using Kitti and NuScenes datasets with PointPillars and CenterPoint detectors, we demonstrate that using earlier layers' activation patterns enhances the error detection performance of the integrity monitoring system, yet increases computational complexity. To address the real-time operation requirements in ADS, we also introduce a novel introspection method that combines activation patterns from multiple layers of the detector's backbone and report its performance.

FashionFail: Addressing Failure Cases in Fashion Object Detection and Segmentation

In the realm of fashion object detection and segmentation for online shopping images, existing state-of-the-art fashion parsing models encounter limitations, particularly when exposed to non-model-worn apparel and close-up shots. To address these failures, we introduce FashionFail; a new fashion dataset with e-commerce images for object detection and segmentation. The dataset is efficiently curated using our novel annotation tool that leverages recent foundation models. The primary objective of FashionFail is to serve as a test bed for evaluating the robustness of models. Our analysis reveals the shortcomings of leading models, such as Attribute-Mask R-CNN and Fashionformer. Additionally, we propose a baseline approach using naive data augmentation to mitigate common failure cases and improve model robustness. Through this work, we aim to inspire and support further research in fashion item detection and segmentation for industrial applications. The dataset, annotation tool, code, and models are available at \url{https://rizavelioglu.github.io/fashionfail/}.

Fusion-Mamba for Cross-modality Object Detection

Cross-modality fusing complementary information from different modalities effectively improves object detection performance, making it more useful and robust for a wider range of applications. Existing fusion strategies combine different types of images or merge different backbone features through elaborated neural network modules. However, these methods neglect that modality disparities affect cross-modality fusion performance, as different modalities with different camera focal lengths, placements, and angles are hardly fused. In this paper, we investigate cross-modality fusion by associating cross-modal features in a hidden state space based on an improved Mamba with a gating mechanism. We design a Fusion-Mamba block (FMB) to map cross-modal features into a hidden state space for interaction, thereby reducing disparities between cross-modal features and enhancing the representation consistency of fused features. FMB contains two modules: the State Space Channel Swapping (SSCS) module facilitates shallow feature fusion, and the Dual State Space Fusion (DSSF) enables deep fusion in a hidden state space. Through extensive experiments on public datasets, our proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on $m$AP with 5.9% on $M^3FD$ and 4.9% on FLIR-Aligned datasets, demonstrating superior object detection performance. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to explore the potential of Mamba for cross-modal fusion and establish a new baseline for cross-modality object detection.

MOSE: Boosting Vision-based Roadside 3D Object Detection with Scene Cues

3D object detection based on roadside cameras is an additional way for autonomous driving to alleviate the challenges of occlusion and short perception range from vehicle cameras. Previous methods for roadside 3D object detection mainly focus on modeling the depth or height of objects, neglecting the stationary of cameras and the characteristic of inter-frame consistency. In this work, we propose a novel framework, namely MOSE, for MOnocular 3D object detection with Scene cuEs. The scene cues are the frame-invariant scene-specific features, which are crucial for object localization and can be intuitively regarded as the height between the surface of the real road and the virtual ground plane. In the proposed framework, a scene cue bank is designed to aggregate scene cues from multiple frames of the same scene with a carefully designed extrinsic augmentation strategy. Then, a transformer-based decoder lifts the aggregated scene cues as well as the 3D position embeddings for 3D object location, which boosts generalization ability in heterologous scenes. The extensive experiment results on two public benchmarks demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of the proposed method, which surpasses the existing methods by a large margin.

Algorithmic Ways of Seeing: Using Object Detection to Facilitate Art Exploration

This Research through Design paper explores how object detection may be applied to a large digital art museum collection to facilitate new ways of encountering and experiencing art. We present the design and evaluation of an interactive application called SMKExplore, which allows users to explore a museum's digital collection of paintings by browsing through objects detected in the images, as a novel form of open-ended exploration. We provide three contributions. First, we show how an object detection pipeline can be integrated into a design process for visual exploration. Second, we present the design and development of an app that enables exploration of an art museum's collection. Third, we offer reflections on future possibilities for museums and HCI researchers to incorporate object detection techniques into the digitalization of museums.