Object detection models are vulnerable to backdoor or trojan attacks, where an attacker can inject malicious triggers into the model, leading to altered behavior during inference. As a defense mechanism, trigger inversion leverages optimization to reverse-engineer triggers and identify compromised models. While existing trigger inversion methods assume that each instance from the support set is equally affected by the injected trigger, we observe that the poison effect can vary significantly across bounding boxes in object detection models due to its dense prediction nature, leading to an undesired optimization objective misalignment issue for existing trigger reverse-engineering methods. To address this challenge, we propose the first object detection backdoor detection framework Django (Detecting Trojans in Object Detection Models via Gaussian Focus Calibration). It leverages a dynamic Gaussian weighting scheme that prioritizes more vulnerable victim boxes and assigns appropriate coefficients to calibrate the optimization objective during trigger inversion. In addition, we combine Django with a novel label proposal pre-processing technique to enhance its efficiency. We evaluate Django on 3 object detection image datasets, 3 model architectures, and 2 types of attacks, with a total of 168 models. Our experimental results show that Django outperforms 6 state-of-the-art baselines, with up to 38% accuracy improvement and 10x reduced overhead.

This paper proposes a smart way to manage municipal solid waste by using the Internet of Things (IoT) and computer vision (CV) to monitor illegal waste dumping at garbage vulnerable points (GVPs) in urban areas. The system can quickly detect and monitor dumped waste using a street-level camera and object detection algorithm. Data was collected from the Sangareddy district in Telangana, India. A series of comprehensive experiments was carried out using the proposed dataset to assess the accuracy and overall performance of various object detection models. Specifically, we performed an in-depth evaluation of YOLOv8, YOLOv10, YOLO11m, and RT-DETR on our dataset. Among these models, YOLO11m achieved the highest accuracy of 92.39\% in waste detection, demonstrating its effectiveness in detecting waste. Additionally, it attains an mAP@50 of 0.91, highlighting its high precision. These findings confirm that the object detection model is well-suited for monitoring and tracking waste dumping events at GVP locations. Furthermore, the system effectively captures waste disposal patterns, including hourly, daily, and weekly dumping trends, ensuring comprehensive daily and nightly monitoring.

Visually impaired people face significant challenges in their day-to-day commutes in the urban cities of Bangladesh due to the vast number of obstructions on every path. With many injuries taking place through road accidents on a daily basis, it is paramount for a system to be developed that can alert the visually impaired of objects at close distance beforehand. To overcome this issue, a novel alert system is proposed in this research to assist the visually impaired in commuting through these busy streets without colliding with any objects. The proposed system can alert the individual to objects that are present at a close distance. It utilizes transfer learning to train models for depth estimation and object detection, and combines both models to introduce a novel system. The models are optimized through the utilization of quantization techniques to make them lightweight and efficient, allowing them to be easily deployed on embedded systems. The proposed solution achieved a lightweight real-time depth estimation and object detection model with an mAP50 of 0.801.

-- The verification of successful grasps is a crucial aspect of robot manipulation, particularly when handling de-formable objects. In this work, we present a vision-based approach for grasp verification to determine whether the robotic gripper has successfully grasped an object. Our method employs a two-stage architecture; first a YOLO-based object detection model to detect and locate the robot's gripper and then a ResNet-based classifier determines the presence of an object. T o address the limitations of real-world data capture, we introduce HSR-GraspSynth, a synthetic dataset designed to simulate diverse grasping scenarios. Furthermore, we explore the use of Visual Question Answering capabilities as a zero-shot baseline to which we compare our model. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves high accuracy in real-world environments, with potential for integration into grasping pipelines. Index T erms -- Grasp verification, Robot manipulation, De-formable objects, Vision-based grasping, YOLO object detection, ResNet classification, Synthetic dataset, Visual Question Answering. I. INTRODUCTION Deformable object manipulation is a growing field of research in robotics due to its relevance in a wide range of tasks [26].

Image analysis is a key tool for describing the detailed mechanisms of folliculogenesis, such as evaluating the quantity of mouse Primordial ovarian Follicles (PMF) in the ovarian reserve. The development of high-resolution virtual slide scanners offers the possibility of quantifying, robustifying and accelerating the histopathological procedure. A major challenge for machine learning is to control the precision of predictions while enabling a high recall, in order to provide reproducibility. We use a multiple testing procedure that gives an overperforming way to solve the standard Precision-Recall trade-off that gives probabilistic guarantees on the precision. In addition, we significantly improve the overall performance of the models (increase of F1-score) by selecting the decision threshold using contextual biological information or using an auxiliary model. As it is model-agnostic, this contextual selection procedure paves the way to the development of a strategy that can improve the performance of any model without the need of retraining it.

Object detection models are vulnerable to backdoor or trojan attacks, where an attacker can inject malicious triggers into the model, leading to altered behavior during inference. As a defense mechanism, trigger inversion leverages optimization to reverse-engineer triggers and identify compromised models. While existing trigger inversion methods assume that each instance from the support set is equally affected by the injected trigger, we observe that the poison effect can vary significantly across bounding boxes in object detection models due to its dense prediction nature, leading to an undesired optimization objective misalignment issue for existing trigger reverse-engineering methods. To address this challenge, we propose the first object detection backdoor detection framework Django (Detecting Trojans in Object Detection Models via Gaussian Focus Calibration). It leverages a dynamic Gaussian weighting scheme that prioritizes more vulnerable victim boxes and assigns appropriate coefficients to calibrate the optimization objective during trigger inversion.

Drone-captured images present significant challenges in object detection due to varying shooting conditions, which can alter object appearance and shape. Factors such as drone altitude, angle, and weather cause these variations, influencing the performance of object detection algorithms. To tackle these challenges, we introduce an innovative vision-language approach using learnable prompts. This shift from conventional manual prompts aims to reduce domain-specific knowledge interference, ultimately improving object detection capabilities. Furthermore, we streamline the training process with a one-step approach, updating the learnable prompt concurrently with model training, enhancing efficiency without compromising performance. Our study contributes to domain-generalized object detection by leveraging learnable prompts and optimizing training processes. This enhances model robustness and adaptability across diverse environments, leading to more effective aerial object detection.

Since DNN is vulnerable to carefully crafted adversarial examples, adversarial attack on LiDAR sensors have been extensively studied. We introduce a robust black-box attack dubbed LiDAttack. It utilizes a genetic algorithm with a simulated annealing strategy to strictly limit the location and number of perturbation points, achieving a stealthy and effective attack. And it simulates scanning deviations, allowing it to adapt to dynamic changes in real world scenario variations. Extensive experiments are conducted on 3 datasets (i.e., KITTI, nuScenes, and self-constructed data) with 3 dominant object detection models (i.e., PointRCNN, PointPillar, and PV-RCNN++). The results reveal the efficiency of the LiDAttack when targeting a wide range of object detection models, with an attack success rate (ASR) up to 90%.

As part of our Object Detection release posts, on this post, we would like to showcase the entire application development process from problem identification to model deployment, a seemingly ambitious undertaking. Let me tell you the story of how (and why) I built a plant disease detector web application. You too can build similar applications that will help you in your daily life in just a few hours. If you would like to play with the app, you can find it here and the source code is also available in this repository. A few days ago, I moved to a new home.

I started using IceVision recently as I needed to create an object detection model for the latest Computer Vision Kaggle competition. In this blog, I will explain few important concepts that I found particularly useful as I was getting my feet wet with the IceVision framework. Installing IceVision is fairly easy. We can install just by running the following command in the terminal -- pip install icevision[all] . For a more detailed information about the installation process, you can check out the IceVision documentation which is pretty straightforward.