Use of Bounding Box Annotations is Important for Object Detection

Object detection is making inroads into a variety of industries, with applications ranging from personal security to office productivity. Many applications of computer vision use bounding box annotation for object detection and recognition, including image retrieval, security, surveillance, autonomous vehicle systems, and machine inspection.

Object Detection

Object detection refers to a group of computer vision tasks that include identifying things in digital images.

Predicting the class of one item in a picture is known as image classification. Identifying the position of one or more items in a picture and creating a bounding box around their extent is known as object localization. Object detection combines these two tasks, locating and classifying one or more things in a photograph. The aim of object detection is to find all instances of a given type of object in a picture, such as people, automobiles, or faces. It not only detects but also places all the items of interest in the picture, thanks to the bounding box annotation method.

Use of Bounding Box for Object detection

A rectangular bounding box is used to indicate the position of the object in the image or video. Bounding Box annotation is commonly used to define an object’s physical position. The upper-left corner of the rectangle’s x and y values, as well as the lower-right corner’s x and y coordinates, determine the bounding box’s shape. The (x,y) -axis coordinates of the bounding box center, as well as the box’s width and height, are another popular bounding box format.

In simple words, Annotating with a rectangular drawing of lines from one corner to another of the item in the image according to its shape to make it completely recognized is known as bounding box annotation. To annotate objects for machine learning and deep learning, 2D Bounding Box and 3D Bounding Box annotation are employed.

But, the question is– how does the bounding box work in object detection?

Object detection may be broken down into two parts to answer this question: object categorization and object localization. To put it another way, the computer has to know what an item is and where it is in order to detect it in a picture. However, a single bounding box doesn’t ensure a 100% prediction rate. Enhanced object detection necessitates a large number of bounding boxes, as well as data augmentation approaches.

Also Read: Why pixel accuracy is the future of the image annotation for Machine Learning?

When it comes to future use cases for object detection, the options are infinite. Below is the list of some of the present and prospective applications of object detection in depth.

1. Self Driving Cars:  For autonomous driving, one of the best illustrations of why you need object detection. Self-driving cars should know how to determine whether to accelerate, brake, or turn in the following step. It must first know where all the things around it are and what they are. That necessitates object detection, and we’d simply train the automobile to recognize a collection of recognized things, such as cars and pedestrians, traffic lights, pavements, speed breakers, and other things.

2. Object Tracking:  Object detection systems are also used to monitor things, such as tracking a football during a game, tracking the movement of a cricket bat, or tracking a person in a film. Surveillance and security, traffic monitoring, video communication, robot vision, and animation are just a few of the applications for object tracking.

3. Manufacturing Industry:  Object detection is also used to identify items in industrial operations. Humanity has made enormous progress in manufacturing since the Industrial Revolution. With the advancement of technology, such as sophisticated engineering, computers, robots, and now the Internet of Things (IoT), we are seeing more and more manual labor being replaced by automation. Recent advancements in AI (deep learning) are expected to assist speed this trend toward automation interestingly. Quality control, sorting, and assembly line processes are all part of the quality management process. The method includes object detection.

4. Face Recognition and Detection:  Face detection and recognition are common tasks in computer vision. We discovered that when we upload a photo to Facebook; it recognizes our face. This is a basic use of object detection that we encounter in our daily lives. Face recognition is a type of biometric technology that goes well beyond recognizing the presence of a human face. It genuinely tries to figure out whose face it is.

Face recognition has a wide range of applications. Face recognition is already used to unlock phones and open certain apps. Biometric surveillance also employs face recognition. We use facial recognition at banks, retail establishments, stadiums, airports, and other institutions to decrease crime and avoid violence.

5. Robotics:  Autonomous assistive robots must be able to analyze visual input in real-time in order to react appropriately and swiftly adjust to changes in the environment. The ability to reliably identify and recognize objects is typically a prerequisite for achieving this aim.

6. Medical Imaging:  Medical image processing software is becoming more essential in aiding physicians with diagnosis, treatment planning, and image-guided treatments. In medical image analysis, accurate, robust, and rapid tracking of deformable anatomical objects like the heart is critical.

7. Automated CCTV:  CCTVs are usually active all the time, we need a big memory system to store the captured footage. Using an object detection system, we can automate CCTV such that only recording begins when certain items are identified. We can reduce the number of times we record the same image frames by doing so, which improves memory efficiency. Using this object detection method, we can reduce the memory required.