A Dataset And Benchmark Of Underwater Object Detection For Robot Picking

TL;DR

This paper introduces DUO, a comprehensive underwater object detection dataset and benchmark, addressing existing dataset limitations and enabling standardized evaluation of detection algorithms for robotic underwater picking.

Contribution

The paper presents DUO, a new annotated dataset and benchmark for underwater object detection, improving data diversity, annotation quality, and providing a unified platform for algorithm comparison.

Findings

DUO dataset enhances diversity and annotation accuracy.

Benchmark evaluates efficiency and accuracy of detection algorithms.

JETSON AGX XAVIER used to assess detector speed in embedded environments.

Abstract

Underwater object detection for robot picking has attracted a lot of interest. However, it is still an unsolved problem due to several challenges. We take steps towards making it more realistic by addressing the following challenges. Firstly, the currently available datasets basically lack the test set annotations, causing researchers must compare their method with other SOTAs on a self-divided test set (from the training set). Training other methods lead to an increase in workload and different researchers divide different datasets, resulting there is no unified benchmark to compare the performance of different algorithms. Secondly, these datasets also have other shortcomings, e.g., too many similar images or incomplete labels. Towards these challenges we introduce a dataset, Detecting Underwater Objects (DUO), and a corresponding benchmark, based on the collection and re-annotation of all relevant datasets. DUO contains a collection of diverse underwater images with more rational annotations. The corresponding benchmark provides indicators of both efficiency and accuracy of SOTAs (under the MMDtection framework) for academic research and industrial applications, where JETSON AGX XAVIER is used to assess detector speed to simulate the robot-embedded environment.