Object Detection

Object detection is one of the most important applications of computer vision. Object detection is the task of simultaneous localization and identification of an object that is present in an image. For autonomous vehicles to safely navigate the streets, the algorithm must detect the presence of pedestrians, roads, vehicles, traffic lights, signs, and unexpected obstacles. In security, the presence of an intruder can be used to trigger an alarm or inform the appropriate authorities.

Though important, object detection has been a long-standing problem in computer vision. Many algorithms have been proposed but are generally slow, with low precision and recall. Similar to what AlexNet [1] has achieved in the ImageNet large-scale image classification problem, deep learning has significantly advanced the area of object detection. State-of-the-art object detection methods can now run in real time and have a much higher precision and recall.

In this chapter, we...