Robustness of Deep Learning Methods for Occluded Object Detection - A Study Introducing a Novel Occlusion Dataset

A large number of deep learning based object detection algorithms have been proposed and applied in a wide range of domains such as security, autonomous driving and robotics. In practical usage, objects being occluded are common, and can result in reduced accuracy and reliability. To increase the robustness of object detection algorithms under occlusion scenarios, it is necessary to consider the influence of different types of occlusion on the performance of object detection approaches. Our research revealed a gap in benchmarking datasets that could provide exemplars of occlusion that covered a range of occlusion scenarios. In this paper, we present a new benchmarking dataset that includes a range of exemplars providing coverage of different types of occlusion cases. This dataset is designed for object detection of everyday objects in indoor scenarios, and comprises occlusion in three orthogonal atomic factors, namely, the degree of occlusion, the location of occlusion, and classes of occluded object and those occluding other objects. Our dataset is balanced in terms of classes and degrees of occlusion, with a total of 5970 sample images. The effect of these three atomic factors has been investigated on some classic general object detectors. Using this benchmarking dataset, we also present results on the impact of the distribution of the training dataset, in terms of degree of occlusion, on the robustness of several typical object detection algorithms (e.g. Fast RCNN, Faster RCNN, and FCOS, etc). The benchmark is available at “https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/13VkLgbx6t0-vA3vRWrlvHcjra-8BS4aL?usp=sharing”. This dataset is seen as a key contribution to research investigating the influence of occlusion on the performance of object detectors.