A New Urban Objects Detection Framework Using Weakly Annotated Sets

Urban informatics explore data science methods to address different urban issues intensively based on data. The large variety and quantity of data available should be explored but this brings important challenges. For instance, although there are powerful computer vision methods that may be explored, they may require large annotated datasets. In this work we propose a novel approach to automatically creating an object recognition system with minimal manual annotation. The basic idea behind the method is to use large input datasets using available online cameras on large cities. A off-the-shelf weak classifier is used to detect an initial set of urban elements of interest (e.g. cars, pedestrians, bikes, etc.). Such initial dataset undergoes a quality control procedure and it is subsequently used to fine tune a strong classifier. Quality control and comparative performance assessment are used as part of the pipeline. We evaluate the method for detecting cars based on monitoring cameras. Experimental results using real data show that despite losing generality, the final detector provides better detection rates tailored to the selected cameras. The programmed robot gathered 770 video hours from 24 online city cameras (\~300GB), which has been fed to the proposed system. Our approach has shown that the method nearly doubled the recall (93\%) with respect to state-of-the-art methods using off-the-shelf algorithms.