Deep-learning-based object detection is a state-of-the-art yet powerful algorithm. And over the course of the last couple of years, a lot of progress has been made in this field. It has momentum and huge potential for the future, I think.
Now is the high time for actual implementation to solve problems. The project “Microplastic AI” is aiming for building the AI that can detect plastic debris on the beach. And object detection is going to be a core technology of the project.
As in the last article, training YOLO with 1 class was a good success (Train Object Detection System with 1 Class). But in order to delve into this system even deeper, I extended the training dataset and ended up to have 3 classes. Just for your convenience, I open sourced the training data as follows.
GitHub repository:
jp_coins_dataset
The training data has 524 images in total. In addition to that, the dataset has text files in which bounding boxes are annotated. And some config files also come with. At first, I had no idea if this amount of data has enough feature information to detect objects, but the end result was pleasant.
Here’s one of the results.
An interesting takeaway is the comparison between the model trained with 1 class and the one with 3 classes. Prediction accuracy of the model with 3 classes obviously outperforms. I think this is because a 1 yen coin and a 100 yen coin have similar color, and having been both classes trained, the neural network seems to have learned a subtle difference between those classes. This means that if you’re likely to have similar objects
Let’s say you have an image that has an object that you’re going to detect, and visually similar objects may be in the adjacent space. In a situation like that, you should train not only your target object but also similar objects. Because that would allow you a better detection accuracy.
With this experiment done successfully, the microplastic AI project has been one step closer to reality.
References:
Darknet official project site:
https://pjreddie.com/darknet/yolo/
Github repository
https://github.com/AlexeyAB/darknet