What's in the Black Box? The False Negative Mechanisms Inside Object Detectors

Dimity Miller, Peyman Moghadam, Mark Cox, Matt Wildie, Raja Jurdak

Abstract: In object detection, false negatives arise when a detector fails to detect a target object. To understand <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">why</i> object detectors produce false negatives, we identify five ‘false negative mechanisms,’ where each mechanism describes how a specific component inside the detector architecture failed. Focusing on two-stage and one-stage anchor-box object detector architectures, we introduce a framework for quantifying these false negative mechanisms. Using this framework, we investigate why Faster R-CNN and RetinaNet fail to detect objects in benchmark vision datasets and robotics datasets. We show that a detector’s false negative mechanisms differ significantly between computer vision benchmark datasets and robotics deployment scenarios. This has implications for the translation of object detectors developed for benchmark datasets to robotics applications.