Dataset Evaluation Method for Vehicle Detection Using TensorFlow Object Detection API

Abstract: Recent developments in the field of object detection have highlighted a significant variation in quality between visual datasets. As a result, there is a need for a standardized approach of validating visual dataset features and their performance contribution. With a focus on vehicle detection, this thesis aims to develop an evaluation method utilized for comparing visual datasets. This method was utilized to determine the dataset that contributed to the detection model with the greatest ability to detect vehicles. The visual datasets compared in this research were BDD100K, KITTI and Udacity, each one being trained on individual models. Applying the developed evaluation method, a strong indication of BDD100K's performance superiority was determined. Further analysis and feature extraction of dataset size, label distribution and average labels per image was conducted. In addition, real-world experimental conduction was performed in order to validate the developed evaluation method. It could be determined that all features and experimental results pointed to BDD100K's superiority over the other datasets, validating the developed evaluation method. Furthermore, the TensorFlow Object Detection API's ability to improve performance gain from a visual dataset was studied. Through the use of augmentations, it was concluded that the TensorFlow Object Detection API serves as a great tool to increase performance gain for visual datasets.