Semi-automatic learning framework combining object detection and background subtraction

Public datasets used to train modern object detection models do not contain all the object classes appearing in real-world surveillance scenes. Even if they appear, they might be vastly different. Therefore, object detectors implemented in the real world must accommodate unknown objects and adapt to the scene. We implemented a framework that combines background subtraction and unknown object detection to improve the pretrained detector’s performance and apply human intervention to review the detected objects to minimize the latent risk of introducing wrongly labeled samples to the training. The proposed system enhanced the original YOLOv3 object detector performance in almost all the metrics analyzed, and managed to incorporate new classes without losing previous training information.