Improving Classification of Occluded Objects through Scene Context

TL;DR

This paper enhances object detection accuracy in occluded scenes by integrating scene context through two fusion techniques, improving recall and precision in challenging datasets.

Contribution

It introduces two novel scene-based information fusion methods to improve occluded object detection in RPN-DCNN networks, demonstrating their effectiveness.

Findings

Improved recall and precision on occluded object datasets

Training on combined occluded and unoccluded images yields better results

The proposed methods are interpretable and adaptable to other datasets

Abstract

The presence of occlusions has provided substantial challenges to typically-powerful object recognition algorithms. Additional sources of information can be extremely valuable to reduce errors caused by occlusions. Scene context is known to aid in object recognition in biological vision. In this work, we attempt to add robustness into existing Region Proposal Network-Deep Convolutional Neural Network (RPN-DCNN) object detection networks through two distinct scene-based information fusion techniques. We present one algorithm under each methodology: the first operates prior to prediction, selecting a custom object network to use based on the identified background scene, and the second operates after detection, fusing scene knowledge into initial object scores output by the RPN. We demonstrate our algorithms on challenging datasets featuring partial occlusions, which show overall improvement in both recall and precision against baseline methods. In addition, our experiments contrast multiple training methodologies for occlusion handling, finding that training on a combination of both occluded and unoccluded images demonstrates an improvement over the others. Our method is interpretable and can easily be adapted to other datasets, offering many future directions for research and practical applications.