Deep Object Detection Lecture
Nowadays, Artificial Intelligence drives scientific and economic growth worldwide. This is largely due to advances in Machine Learning (ML), notably in Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), which are essentially massive ‘learning by experience/examples’ systems. Their applications span and revolutionize almost every human activity:
-Autonomous Systems (cars, drones, vessels),
-Media Content and Art Creation (including fake data creation/detection), Social Media Analytics,
-Medical Imaging and Diagnosis,
-Financial Engineering (forecasting and analytics), Big Data Analytics,
-Broadcasting, Internet and Communications,
-Robotics/Control
-Intelligent Human-Machine Interaction, Anthropocentric (human-centered)Computing,
-Smart Cities/Buildings and Assisted living.
-Scientific Modeling and Analytics.
Several DNN advances and challenges hit the news almost every day, arising discussions on AI ethics, privacy protection and its societal impact.
Recently, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have been used for object/target (e.g., face, person, car, pedestrian, road sign) detection with great results. However, using such CNN models on embedded processors for real-time processing is prohibited by HW constraints. In that sense, various architectures and settings will be examined in order to facilitate and accelerate the use of embedded CNN-based object detectors with limited computational capabilities. The following target detection topics will be presented: Object detection as search and classification task. Detection as classification and regression task. Modern architectures for target detection (e.g., RCNN, Faster-RCNN, YOLO v4, SSD, RetinaNet, RBFNet, CornerNet, CenterNet, DETR), Lightweight architectures, Data augmentation and Deployment are presented in detail. Evaluation and benchmarking measures are detailed.