Exploring the Applications of Faster R-CNN and Single-Shot Multi-box Detection in a Smart Nursery Domain

The ultimate goal of a baby detection task concerns detecting the presence of a baby and other objects in a sequence of 2D images, tracking them and understanding the semantic contents of the scene. Recent advances in deep learning and computer vision offer various powerful tools in general object detection and can be applied to a baby detection task. In this paper, the Faster Region-based Convolutional Neural Network and the Single-Shot Multi-Box Detection approaches are explored. They are the two state-of-the-art object detectors based on the region proposal tactic and the multi-box tactic. The presence of a baby in the scene obtained from these detectors, tested using different pre-trained models, are discussed. This study is important since the behaviors of these detectors in a baby detection task using different pre-trained models are still not well understood. This exploratory study reveals many useful insights into the applications of these object detectors in the smart nursery domain.