A Parallel Open-World Object Detection Framework with Uncertainty Mitigation for Campus Monitoring

Abstract

The recent advancements in artificial intelligence have brought about significant changes in education. In the context of intelligent campus development, target detection technology plays a pivotal role in applications such as campus environment monitoring and the facilitation of classroom behavior surveillance. However, traditional object detection methods face challenges in open and dynamic campus scenarios where unexpected objects and behaviors arise. Open-World Object Detection (OWOD) addresses this issue by enabling detectors to gradually learn and recognize unknown objects. Nevertheless, existing OWOD methods introduce two major uncertainties that limit the detection performance: the unknown discovery uncertainty from the manual generation of pseudo-labels for unknown objects and the known discrimination uncertainty from perturbations that unknown training introduces to the known class features. In this paper, we introduce a Parallel OWOD Framework with Uncertainty Mitigation to alleviate the unknown discovery uncertainty and the known discrimination uncertainty within the OWOD task. To address the unknown discovery uncertainty, we propose an objectness-driven discovery module to focus on capturing the generalized objectness shared among various known classes, driving the framework to discover more potential objects that are distinct from the background, including unknown objects. To mitigate the discrimination uncertainty, we decouple the learning processes for known and unknown classes through a parallel structure to reduce the mutual influence at the feature level and design a collaborative open-world classifier to achieve high-performance collaborative detection of both known and unknown classes. Our framework provides educators with a powerful tool for effective campus monitoring and classroom management. Experimental results on standard benchmarks demonstrate the framework’s superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods, showcasing its transformative potential in intelligent educational environments.