An Efficient Method for Video Object Detection in Automatic Scoring of Physical Experimental Operations

Abstract

Automatic scoring of students’ physical experimental operations is a very practical application which has not been researched deeply. The common method for automatic scoring of students’ experimental operations is to infer the behavior of experimental operations through the state of experimental instruments. Video object detection is the basic task of detecting the state of experimental instruments, and the problem of missed detection or false detection in video multi-object detection is one of the main reasons leading to the error of automatic scoring results. However, existing methods of video object detection mainly improve the accuracy of the model in public datasets, which has the disadvantage of not correcting false detection while improving accuracy. Therefore, an efficient video object detection method composed of YOLOv5 and a logical reasoning post-processing method was proposed to fill this gap. We compared our method with other state-of-the-art methods on three independent datasets of physical experimental instruments. We established a pipeline for automatic scoring of students’ experimental operations, designed flow charts and state score tables of three physics experiments, and compared the automatic scoring results with the average scores of six experimental teachers. The results show that our method is more robust and efficient in this application scenario. We hope this report can promote the application of logical reasoning methods in video object detection.