A New Dataset and Performance Evaluation of a Region-Based CNN for Urban Object Detection

In recent years, we have seen a large growth in the number of applications which use deep learning-based object detectors. Autonomous driving assistance systems (ADAS) are one of the areas where they have the most impact. This work presents a novel study evaluating a state-of-the-art technique for urban object detection and localization. In particular, we investigated the performance of the Faster R-CNN method to detect and localize urban objects in a variety of outdoor urban videos involving pedestrians, cars, bicycles and other objects moving in the scene (urban driving). We propose a new dataset that is used for benchmarking the accuracy of a real-time object detector (Faster R-CNN). Part of the data was collected using an HD camera mounted on a vehicle. Furthermore, some of the data is weakly annotated so it can be used for testing weakly supervised learning techniques. There already exist urban object datasets, but none of them include all the essential urban objects. We carried out extensive experiments demonstrating the effectiveness of the baseline approach. Additionally, we propose an R-CNN plus tracking technique to accelerate the process of real-time urban object detection.