Open-Set Object Detection By Aligning Known Class Representations

Open-Set Object Detection (OSOD) has emerged as a contemporary research direction to address the detection of unknown objects. Recently, few works have achieved remarkable performance in the OSOD task by employing contrastive clustering to separate unknown classes. In contrast, we propose a new semantic clustering-based approach to facilitate a meaningful alignment of clusters in semantic space and introduce a class decorrelation module to enhance inter-cluster separation. Our approach further incorporates an object focus module to predict objectness scores, which enhances the detection of unknown objects. Further, we employ i) an evaluation technique that penalizes low-confidence outputs to mitigate the risk of misclassification of the unknown objects and ii) a new metric called HMP that combines known and unknown precision using harmonic mean. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed model achieves significant improvement on the MS-COCO & PASCAL VOC dataset for the OSOD task.

YOLO-UniOW: Efficient Universal Open-World Object Detection

Traditional object detection models are constrained by the limitations of closed-set datasets, detecting only categories encountered during training. While multimodal models have extended category recognition by aligning text and image modalities, they introduce significant inference overhead due to cross-modality fusion and still remain restricted by predefined vocabulary, leaving them ineffective at handling unknown objects in open-world scenarios. In this work, we introduce Universal Open-World Object Detection (Uni-OWD), a new paradigm that unifies open-vocabulary and open-world object detection tasks. To address the challenges of this setting, we propose YOLO-UniOW, a novel model that advances the boundaries of efficiency, versatility, and performance. YOLO-UniOW incorporates Adaptive Decision Learning to replace computationally expensive cross-modality fusion with lightweight alignment in the CLIP latent space, achieving efficient detection without compromising generalization. Additionally, we design a Wildcard Learning strategy that detects out-of-distribution objects as "unknown" while enabling dynamic vocabulary expansion without the need for incremental learning. This design empowers YOLO-UniOW to seamlessly adapt to new categories in open-world environments. Extensive experiments validate the superiority of YOLO-UniOW, achieving achieving 34.6 AP and 30.0 APr on LVIS with an inference speed of 69.6 FPS. The model also sets benchmarks on M-OWODB, S-OWODB, and nuScenes datasets, showcasing its unmatched performance in open-world object detection. Code and models are available at https://github.com/THU-MIG/YOLO-UniOW.

SM3Det: A Unified Model for Multi-Modal Remote Sensing Object Detection

With the rapid advancement of remote sensing technology, high-resolution multi-modal imagery is now more widely accessible. Conventional Object detection models are trained on a single dataset, often restricted to a specific imaging modality and annotation format. However, such an approach overlooks the valuable shared knowledge across multi-modalities and limits the model's applicability in more versatile scenarios. This paper introduces a new task called Multi-Modal Datasets and Multi-Task Object Detection (M2Det) for remote sensing, designed to accurately detect horizontal or oriented objects from any sensor modality. This task poses challenges due to 1) the trade-offs involved in managing multi-modal modelling and 2) the complexities of multi-task optimization. To address these, we establish a benchmark dataset and propose a unified model, SM3Det (Single Model for Multi-Modal datasets and Multi-Task object Detection). SM3Det leverages a grid-level sparse MoE backbone to enable joint knowledge learning while preserving distinct feature representations for different modalities. Furthermore, it integrates a consistency and synchronization optimization strategy using dynamic learning rate adjustment, allowing it to effectively handle varying levels of learning difficulty across modalities and tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate SM3Det's effectiveness and generalizability, consistently outperforming specialized models on individual datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/zcablii/SM3Det.

Solar Filaments Detection using Active Contours Without Edges

In this article, an active contours without edges (ACWE)-based algorithm has been proposed for the detection of solar filaments in H-alpha full-disk solar images. The overall algorithm consists of three main steps of image processing. These are image pre-processing, image segmentation, and image post-processing. Here in the work, contours are initialized on the solar image and allowed to deform based on the energy function. As soon as the contour reaches the boundary of the desired object, the energy function gets reduced, and the contour stops evolving. The proposed algorithm has been applied to few benchmark datasets and has been compared with the classical technique of object detection. The results analysis indicates that the proposed algorithm outperforms the results obtained using the existing classical algorithm of object detection.

TiGDistill-BEV: Multi-view BEV 3D Object Detection via Target Inner-Geometry Learning Distillation

Accurate multi-view 3D object detection is essential for applications such as autonomous driving. Researchers have consistently aimed to leverage LiDAR's precise spatial information to enhance camera-based detectors through methods like depth supervision and bird-eye-view (BEV) feature distillation. However, existing approaches often face challenges due to the inherent differences between LiDAR and camera data representations. In this paper, we introduce the TiGDistill-BEV, a novel approach that effectively bridges this gap by leveraging the strengths of both sensors. Our method distills knowledge from diverse modalities(e.g., LiDAR) as the teacher model to a camera-based student detector, utilizing the Target Inner-Geometry learning scheme to enhance camera-based BEV detectors through both depth and BEV features by leveraging diverse modalities. Specially, we propose two key modules: an inner-depth supervision module to learn the low-level relative depth relations within objects which equips detectors with a deeper understanding of object-level spatial structures, and an inner-feature BEV distillation module to transfer high-level semantics of different key points within foreground targets. To further alleviate the domain gap, we incorporate both inter-channel and inter-keypoint distillation to model feature similarity. Extensive experiments on the nuScenes benchmark demonstrate that TiGDistill-BEV significantly boosts camera-based only detectors achieving a state-of-the-art with 62.8% NDS and surpassing previous methods by a significant margin. The codes is available at: https://github.com/Public-BOTs/TiGDistill-BEV.git.

Humanoid Robot RHP Friends: Seamless Combination of Autonomous and Teleoperated Tasks in a Nursing Context

This paper describes RHP Friends, a social humanoid robot developed to enable assistive robotic deployments in human-coexisting environments. As a use-case application, we present its potential use in nursing by extending its capabilities to operate human devices and tools according to the task and by enabling remote assistance operations. To meet a wide variety of tasks and situations in environments designed by and for humans, we developed a system that seamlessly integrates the slim and lightweight robot and several technologies: locomanipulation, multi-contact motion, teleoperation, and object detection and tracking. We demonstrated the system's usage in a nursing application. The robot efficiently performed the daily task of patient transfer and a non-routine task, represented by a request to operate a circuit breaker. This demonstration, held at the 2023 International Robot Exhibition (IREX), conducted three times a day over three days.

Differential Evolution Integrated Hybrid Deep Learning Model for Object Detection in Pre-made Dishes

With the continuous improvement of people's living standards and fast-paced working conditions, pre-made dishes are becoming increasingly popular among families and restaurants due to their advantages of time-saving, convenience, variety, cost-effectiveness, standard quality, etc. Object detection is a key technology for selecting ingredients and evaluating the quality of dishes in the pre-made dishes industry. To date, many object detection approaches have been proposed. However, accurate object detection of pre-made dishes is extremely difficult because of overlapping occlusion of ingredients, similarity of ingredients, and insufficient light in the processing environment. As a result, the recognition scene is relatively complex and thus leads to poor object detection by a single model. To address this issue, this paper proposes a Differential Evolution Integrated Hybrid Deep Learning (DEIHDL) model. The main idea of DEIHDL is three-fold: 1) three YOLO-based and transformer-based base models are developed respectively to increase diversity for detecting objects of pre-made dishes, 2) the three base models are integrated by differential evolution optimized self-adjusting weights, and 3) weighted boxes fusion strategy is employed to score the confidence of the three base models during the integration. As such, DEIHDL possesses the multi-performance originating from the three base models to achieve accurate object detection in complex pre-made dish scenes. Extensive experiments on real datasets demonstrate that the proposed DEIHDL model significantly outperforms the base models in detecting objects of pre-made dishes.

SimLTD: Simple Supervised and Semi-Supervised Long-Tailed Object Detection

Recent years have witnessed tremendous advances on modern visual recognition systems. Despite such progress, many vision models still struggle with the open problem of learning from few exemplars. This paper focuses on the task of object detection in the setting where object classes follow a natural long-tailed distribution. Existing approaches to long-tailed detection resort to external ImageNet labels to augment the low-shot training instances. However, such dependency on a large labeled database is impractical and has limited utility in realistic scenarios. We propose a more versatile approach to leverage optional unlabeled images, which are easy to collect without the burden of human annotations. Our SimLTD framework is straightforward and intuitive, and consists of three simple steps: (1) pre-training on abundant head classes; (2) transfer learning on scarce tail classes; and (3) fine-tuning on a sampled set of both head and tail classes. Our approach can be viewed as an improved head-to-tail model transfer paradigm without the added complexities of meta-learning or knowledge distillation, as was required in past research. By harnessing supplementary unlabeled images, without extra image labels, SimLTD establishes new record results on the challenging LVIS v1 benchmark across both supervised and semi-supervised settings.

Plastic Waste Classification Using Deep Learning: Insights from the WaDaBa Dataset

With the increasing use of plastic, the challenges associated with managing plastic waste have become more challenging, emphasizing the need of effective solutions for classification and recycling. This study explores the potential of deep learning, focusing on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and object detection models like YOLO (You Only Look Once), to tackle this issue using the WaDaBa dataset. The study shows that YOLO- 11m achieved highest accuracy (98.03%) and mAP50 (0.990), with YOLO-11n performing similarly but highest mAP50(0.992). Lightweight models like YOLO-10n trained faster but with lower accuracy, whereas MobileNet V2 showed impressive performance (97.12% accuracy) but fell short in object detection. Our study highlights the potential of deep learning models in transforming how we classify plastic waste, with YOLO models proving to be the most effective. By balancing accuracy and computational efficiency, these models can help to create scalable, impactful solutions in waste management and recycling.

Do Current Video LLMs Have Strong OCR Abilities? A Preliminary Study

With the rise of multimodal large language models, accurately extracting and understanding textual information from video content, referred to as video based optical character recognition (Video OCR), has become a crucial capability. This paper introduces a novel benchmark designed to evaluate the video OCR performance of multi-modal models in videos. Comprising 1,028 videos and 2,961 question-answer pairs, this benchmark proposes several key challenges through 6 distinct subtasks: (1) Recognition of text content itself and its basic visual attributes, (2)Semantic and Spatial Comprehension of OCR objects in videos (3) Dynamic Motion detection and Temporal Localization. We developed this benchmark using a semi-automated approach that integrates the OCR ability of image LLMs with manual refinement, balancing efficiency, cost, and data quality. Our resource aims to help advance research in video LLMs and underscores the need for improving OCR ability for video LLMs. The benchmark will be released on https://github.com/YuHuiGao/FG-Bench.git.