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Deep Learning in Object Detection

A special issue of Applied Sciences (ISSN 2076-3417). This special issue belongs to the section "Computing and Artificial Intelligence".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 20 April 2025 | Viewed by 7123

Special Issue Editor


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Guest Editor
School of Informatics, Xiamen University, Xiamen 361005, China
Interests: artificial intelligence; machine learning; deep learning from imcomplete data
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Object detection, a fundamental task in computer vision, plays a vital role in numerous applications, ranging from autonomous driving and surveillance to robotics and augmented reality. Over the past decade, deep learning techniques have revolutionized the field of object detection by achieving remarkable performance improvements and opening up new avenues in research. This Special Issue aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the recent advancements and emerging trends in deep learning for object detection. One of the key challenges in object detection is accurately localizing and classifying objects within complex and diverse scenes. Deep-learning-based approaches have demonstrated significant success in addressing this challenge, leveraging convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to understand rich representations of objects from raw image data. These models have been able to capture intricate patterns, leading to improved detection accuracy and robustness.

The Special Issue encompasses a wide range of research directions, focusing on the development of novel architectures, feature extraction techniques, and training methodologies for deep-learning-based object detection. Researchers have explored various architecture designs, such as one-stage detectors (e.g., YOLO, SSD) and two-stage detectors (e.g., Faster R-CNN, Mask R-CNN), each with its own strengths and trade-offs in terms of speed and accuracy. Additionally, attention mechanisms, such as self-attention and spatial attention, have gained attention for their ability to improve the localization and recognition of objects. Furthermore, the Special Issue delves into advanced techniques that address specific challenges in object detection, including handling small objects, occlusions, and scale variations. Contextual information and semantic relationships between objects have been incorporated to enhance detection performance, while domain adaptation and transfer learning techniques have been explored to mitigate the domain shift problem and improve generalization across different environments.

We hope that this Special Issue will serve as a valuable resource for researchers, practitioners, and enthusiasts working on deep learning for object detection. The included articles provide insights into the state-of-the-art methods, shed light on key challenges, and pave the way for future research directions in this exciting field.

Dr. Yang Lu
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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Keywords

  • object detection
  • deep learning
  • instance segmentation
  • architecture design
  • feature extraction

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Published Papers (4 papers)

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Research

20 pages, 9041 KiB  
Article
D2-SPDM: Faster R-CNN-Based Defect Detection and Surface Pixel Defect Mapping with Label Enhancement in Steel Manufacturing Processes
by Taewook Wi, Minyeol Yang, Suyeon Park and Jongpil Jeong
Appl. Sci. 2024, 14(21), 9836; https://doi.org/10.3390/app14219836 - 28 Oct 2024
Viewed by 781
Abstract
The steel manufacturing process is inherently continuous, meaning that if defects are not effectively detected in the initial stages, they may propagate through subsequent stages, resulting in high costs for corrections in the final product. Therefore, detecting surface defects and obtaining segmentation information [...] Read more.
The steel manufacturing process is inherently continuous, meaning that if defects are not effectively detected in the initial stages, they may propagate through subsequent stages, resulting in high costs for corrections in the final product. Therefore, detecting surface defects and obtaining segmentation information is critical in the steel manufacturing industry to ensure product quality and enhance production efficiency. Specifically, segmentation information is essential for accurately understanding the shape and extent of defects, providing the necessary details for subsequent processes to address these defects. However, the time-consuming and costly process of generating segmentation annotations poses a significant barrier to practical industrial applications. This paper proposes a cost-efficient segmentation labeling framework that combines deep learning-based anomaly detection and label enhancement to address these challenges in the steel manufacturing process. Using ResNet-50, defects are classified, and faster region convolutional neural networks (faster R-CNNs) are employed to identify defect types and generate bounding boxes indicating the defect locations. Subsequently, recursive learning is performed using the GrabCut algorithm and the DeepLabv3+ model based on the generated bounding boxes, significantly reducing annotation costs by generating segmentation labels. The proposed framework effectively detects defects and accurately defines them, even in randomly collected images from the steel manufacturing process, contributing to both quality control and cost reduction. This study presents a novel approach for improving the quality of the steel manufacturing process and is expected to enhance overall efficiency in the steel manufacturing industry. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Deep Learning in Object Detection)
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25 pages, 11915 KiB  
Article
Improving YOLO Detection Performance of Autonomous Vehicles in Adverse Weather Conditions Using Metaheuristic Algorithms
by İbrahim Özcan, Yusuf Altun and Cevahir Parlak
Appl. Sci. 2024, 14(13), 5841; https://doi.org/10.3390/app14135841 - 4 Jul 2024
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 2847
Abstract
Despite the rapid advances in deep learning (DL) for object detection, existing techniques still face several challenges. In particular, object detection in adverse weather conditions (AWCs) requires complex and computationally costly models to achieve high accuracy rates. Furthermore, the generalization capabilities of these [...] Read more.
Despite the rapid advances in deep learning (DL) for object detection, existing techniques still face several challenges. In particular, object detection in adverse weather conditions (AWCs) requires complex and computationally costly models to achieve high accuracy rates. Furthermore, the generalization capabilities of these methods struggle to show consistent performance under different conditions. This work focuses on improving object detection using You Only Look Once (YOLO) versions 5, 7, and 9 in AWCs for autonomous vehicles. Although the default values of the hyperparameters are successful for images without AWCs, there is a need to find the optimum values of the hyperparameters in AWCs. Given the many numbers and wide range of hyperparameters, determining them through trial and error is particularly challenging. In this study, the Gray Wolf Optimizer (GWO), Artificial Rabbit Optimizer (ARO), and Chimpanzee Leader Selection Optimization (CLEO) are independently applied to optimize the hyperparameters of YOLOv5, YOLOv7, and YOLOv9. The results show that the preferred method significantly improves the algorithms’ performances for object detection. The overall performance of the YOLO models on the object detection for AWC task increased by 6.146%, by 6.277% for YOLOv7 + CLEO, and by 6.764% for YOLOv9 + GWO. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Deep Learning in Object Detection)
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18 pages, 3663 KiB  
Article
Adaptive Scale and Correlative Attention PointPillars: An Efficient Real-Time 3D Point Cloud Object Detection Algorithm
by Xinchao Zhai, Yang Gao, Shiwei Chen and Jingshuai Yang
Appl. Sci. 2024, 14(9), 3877; https://doi.org/10.3390/app14093877 - 30 Apr 2024
Viewed by 1236
Abstract
Recognizing 3D objects from point clouds is a crucial technology for autonomous vehicles. Nevertheless, LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) point clouds are generally sparse, and they provide limited contextual information, resulting in unsatisfactory recognition performance for distant or small objects. Consequently, this article [...] Read more.
Recognizing 3D objects from point clouds is a crucial technology for autonomous vehicles. Nevertheless, LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) point clouds are generally sparse, and they provide limited contextual information, resulting in unsatisfactory recognition performance for distant or small objects. Consequently, this article proposes an object recognition algorithm named Adaptive Scale and Correlative Attention PointPillars (ASCA-PointPillars) to address this problem. Firstly, an innovative adaptive scale pillars (ASP) encoding method is proposed, which encodes point clouds using pillars of varying sizes. Secondly, ASCA-PointPillars introduces a feature enhancement mechanism called correlative point attention (CPA) to enhance the feature associations within each pillar. Additionally, a data augmentation algorithm called random sampling data augmentation (RS-Aug) is proposed to solve the class imbalance problem. The experimental results on the KITTI 3D object dataset demonstrate that the proposed ASCA-PointPillars algorithm significantly boosts the recognition performance and RS-Aug effectively enhances the training effects on an imbalanced dataset. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Deep Learning in Object Detection)
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13 pages, 1887 KiB  
Article
Defects Detection on 110 MW AC Wind Farm’s Turbine Generator Blades Using Drone-Based Laser and RGB Images with Res-CNN3 Detector
by Katleho Masita, Ali Hasan and Thokozani Shongwe
Appl. Sci. 2023, 13(24), 13046; https://doi.org/10.3390/app132413046 - 7 Dec 2023
Cited by 5 | Viewed by 1422
Abstract
An effective way to perform maintenance on the wind turbine generator (WTG) blades installed in grid-connected wind farms is to inspect them using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV). The ability to detect wind turbine blade defects from these laser and RGB images captured by [...] Read more.
An effective way to perform maintenance on the wind turbine generator (WTG) blades installed in grid-connected wind farms is to inspect them using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV). The ability to detect wind turbine blade defects from these laser and RGB images captured by drones has been the subject of numerous studies. The issue that most applied techniques battle with is being able to locate different wind turbine blade defects with high confidence scores and precision. The accuracy of these models’ defect detection decreases due to varying testing image scales. This article proposes the Res-CNN3 technique for detecting wind turbine blade defects. In Res-CNN3, defect region detection is achieved through a bipartite process that processes the laser delta and RGB delta structure of a wind turbine blade image with an integration of residual networks and concatenated CNNs to determine the presence of typical defect regions in the image. The loss function is logistic regression, and a Selective Search (SS) algorithm is used to predict the regions of interest (RoI) of the input images for defects detection. Several experiments are conducted, and the outcomes prove that the proposed model has a high prospect for accuracy in solving the problem of defect detection in a manner similar to the advanced benchmark methods. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Deep Learning in Object Detection)
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