Specialized Indoor and Outdoor Scene-specific Object Detection Models

Object detection is a critical task in computer vision with applications across various domains, ranging from autonomous driving to surveillance systems. Despite extensive research on improving the performance of object detection systems, identifying all objects in different places remains a challenge. The traditional object detection approaches focus primarily on extracting and analyzing visual features without considering the contextual information about the places of objects. However, entities in many real-world scenarios closely relate to their surrounding environment, providing crucial contextual cues for accurate detection. This study investigates the importance and impact of places of images (indoor and outdoor) on object detection accuracy. To this purpose, we propose an approach that first categorizes images into two distinct categories: indoor and outdoor. We then train and evaluate three object detection models (indoor, outdoor, and general models) based on YOLOv5 and 19 classes of the PASCAL VOC dataset and 79 classes of COCO dataset that consider places. The experimental evaluations show that the specialized indoor and outdoor models have higher mAP (mean Average Precision) to detect objects in specific environments compared to the general model that detects objects found both indoors and outdoors. Indeed, the network can detect objects more accurately in similar places with common characteristics due to semantic relationships between objects and their surroundings, and the network’s misdetection is diminished. All the results were analyzed statistically with t-tests.