Comparative Study of Convolutional Neural Network Object Detection Algorithms for Image Processing

This paper presents a comparative study on three Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) object detection algorithms to find the best detector based on the combination of speed and accuracy on a personal computer. The MATLAB® development environment is used to evaluate three different object detector algorithms, namely Faster Region-Based Convolutional Network (R-CNN), Single Shot Detector (SSD) and You Only Look Once (YOLO). These algorithms are trained, and their performance metrics are tested on a small sample dataset. The results show that the SSD object detector algorithm performs best when considering both performance and processing speeds. Faster R-CNN detected objects at an average speed of 4.838 seconds and achieved a mean average precision of 0.76 with an average loss of 0.429. SSD detected objects at an average speed of 0.377 seconds and achieved a mean average precision of 0.92 with an average loss of 1.754. YOLO v3 detected objects at an average speed of 1.004 seconds and achieved a mean average precision of 0.81 with an average loss of 2.739.