A Framework to Estimate the Key Point Within an Object Based on a Deep Learning Object Detection

Automatic identification of key points within objects is crucial in various application domains. This paper presents a novel framework for accurately estimating the key point within an object by leveraging deep neural network-based object detection. The proposed framework is built upon a training dataset annotated with four non-overlapping bounding boxes, one of which shares a coordinate with the key point. These bounding boxes collectively cover the entire object, enabling automatic annotation if region annotations around the key point exist. The trained object detector is then utilized to generate detection results, which are subsequently post-processed to estimate the key point. To validate the effectiveness of the framework, experiments were conducted using two distinct datasets: cross-sectional images of a parawood log and pupil images. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed framework surpasses previously proposed approaches in terms of precision, recall, F1-score, and other domain-specific metrics. The improvement in performance can be attributed to the unique annotation strategy and the fusion of object detection and key point estimation within a unified deep learning framework. The contribution of this study lies in introducing a novel framework for closely estimating key points within objects based on deep neural network-based object detection. By leveraging annotated training data and post-processing techniques, our approach achieves superior performance compared to existing methods. This work fills a critical gap in the field by integrating object detection and key point estimation, which has received limited attention in previous research. Our framework provides valuable insights and advancements in key point estimation techniques, offering potential applications in precise object analysis and understanding. © Authors retain all copyrights.