DIG: Improved DINO for Graffiti Detection

Graffiti detection is essential in historic building protection and urban neighborhood management. Graffiti detection has made significant progress in recent years based on the development of deep learning. However, small-scale graffiti, interference from the background, and the false detection of word parts in graffiti make it a challenging problem. This article proposes a Transformer-based high-precision graffiti detection method, namely DIG. Precisely, it consists of three modules: 1) Spatial query selection (SQS), scale-aware IoU loss (SIL); 2) Denoising Task with binary contrastive denoising (BCDN); and 3) IoU-guided box denoising (IBD) modules. To detect small-scale graffiti, this paper proposes SIL to help the loss function to perceive small-scale graffiti and large-scale graffiti fairly. To reduce the false detection of word parts, this article presents the SQS module, which integrates spatial information into the query selection process of the Encoder to filter out falsely detected bounding boxes within the graffiti. To reduce the interference from the background, this article introduces a denoising task with BCDN and IBD modules, improving the model’s ability to distinguish graffiti from the background and accurately select appropriate bounding boxes. A large number of experimental results on the STORM dataset show that our method achieves state-of-the-art results with an $AP_{50}$ of 87.9%. Moreover, DIG achieved competitive results on the FineFM dataset for mask detection. This indicates that DIG can also be conveniently transferred to detect other scenarios.