Humans can easily detect and identify objects present in an image. The human visual system is fast and accurate and can perform complex tasks like identifying multiple objects and detecting obstacles with little conscious thought. With the availability of large amounts of data, faster GPUs, and better algorithms, we can quickly train computers to detect and classify multiple objects within an image with high accuracy.

With this identification and localisation, object detection can count objects in a scene and determine and track their precise locations while accurately labelling them.

Object detection is a key field in Artificial Intelligence, allowing computer systems to “see” their environments by detecting objects in visual images or videos. Object detection is often called object recognition, object identification, and image detection; these concepts are synonymous.

What is object detection?

Object detection is an important computer vision task used to detect instances of visual objects of certain classes (for example, humans, animals, cars, or buildings) in digital images such as photos or video frames. Object detection aims to develop computational models that provide the essential information needed by computer vision applications: “What objects are where?”.

Object detection is not, however, akin to other common computer vision technologies such as classification (assigning a single class to an image), keypoint detection (identifying points of interest in an image), or semantic segmentation (separating the image into regions via masks).

As with every emerging tech, plenty of technical terms might confuse or be thought of as synonyms for computer vision. There’s classification, detection, tracking, counting, and more. However, object detection and image classification are the biggest confusion points. At the most basic level, the difference between classification and detection is simple:

• Image classification: Applies a prediction to an image based on an analysis of the contents.
• Objection detection: Locates objects within an image.

Why is object detection important?

Object detection is one of the fundamental problems of computer vision. Moreover, it forms the basis of many other downstream computer vision tasks, for instance, segmentation, image captioning, object tracking, etc. Specific object detection applications include pedestrian detection, people counting, face detection, text detection, pose detection, and number-plate recognition.

How are object recognition models trained?

The AI model training process for object recognition is similar to that of image recognition. However, one crucial difference is the labels for the input dataset.

Object recognition datasets bundle together an image or video with a list of objects it contains and their locations.

Before training an object recognition model, machine learning experts must decide which categories they would like the AI model to recognise. For example, a simple mask detection model might classify faces in images as “with mask,” ” or “without a mask.” Each faces in the image or video in the training dataset needs to be associated with one of these labels so the model can learn it during the training process.

Once the object recognition model is trained, it can analyse real-world data. For example, the model accepts an image as input and returns a list of predictions for the image’s label. The more data you give your model, the better your device will be at recognising the objects you want and learning how to improve for the future. 

Object detection use cases and applications

The use cases involving object detection are very diverse. There are almost unlimited ways to make computers see like humans to automate manual tasks or create new, AI-powered products and services. It has been implemented in computer vision programs for various applications, from sports production to productivity analytics. Object recognition is the core of most vision-based AI software and programs today. Object detection plays a vital role in scene understanding, popular in security, transportation, medical, and military use cases.

• Object detection in retail: Strategically placed people counting systems throughout multiple retail stores are used to gather information about how customers spend their time and customer footfall. AI-based customer analysis to detect and track customers with cameras helps to understand customer interaction and experience, optimise the store layout, and make operations more efficient. A widespread use case is the detection of queues to reduce waiting time in retail stores.

• Autonomous driving: Self-driving cars depend on object detection to recognise pedestrians, traffic signs, other vehicles, and more. For example, Tesla’s Autopilot AI heavily utilises object detection to perceive environmental and surrounding threats, such as oncoming vehicles or obstacles.
• Video surveillance: Because state-of-the-art object detection techniques can accurately identify and track multiple instances of a given object in a scene, these techniques naturally lend themselves to automated video surveillance systems. For example, object detection models can track multiple people at once, in real-time, as they move through a given scene or across video frames. From retail stores to industrial factory floors, this kind of granular tracking could provide invaluable insights into security, worker performance and safety, retail foot traffic, and more. Example of object detection in video analytics for people detection in dangerous areas using CCTV cameras

• Vehicle detection with AI in transportation: Object recognition is used to detect and count vehicles for traffic analysis or to detect cars that stop in dangerous areas, such as crossroads or highways.
• Animal detection in agriculture: Object detection is used in agriculture for tasks such as counting, animal monitoring, and evaluation of the quality of agricultural products. Damaged produce can be detected while processing using machine learning algorithms.
• Medical feature detection in healthcare: Object detection has allowed for many breakthroughs in the medical community. Because medical diagnostics rely heavily on studying images, scans, and photographs, object detection involving CT and MRI scans has become extremely useful for diagnosing diseases, for example, with ML algorithms for tumour detection.

Data annotation for object recognition

Making object recognition becomes possible with data labelling services. Human annotators spent time and effort manually annotating each image, producing many datasets. Machine learning algorithms need massive training data to train the model.

In data annotation, thousands of images are annotated using various image annotation techniques assigning a specific class to each image. Usually, most AI companies don’t spend their workforce or deploy such resources to generate labelled training datasets.

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