Deep Learning Object Detection Techniques for Thin Objects in Computer Vision: An Experimental Investigation

Efficient detection of thin objects, from stationary or moving images, is significant in a variety of research areas. These research areas include but are not limited to electric power line detection systems, sperm tail detection for clinical sperm research, mooring lines detection, road-lane line detection for autonomous vehicles, and cracks detection for the integrity assessment of building structures. However, the detection of thin objects is a challenging computer vision task owing to the slimmer and less compact nature of these objects. Moreover, the complexity present in certain images, such as the background clutter, further adds to this problem of accurately detecting thin objects. In this work, we investigate a series of state-of-the-art deep learning detectors for thin objects' detection. The detectors examined in this work were: EfficientDet, YOLOv5 and U-Net. The experimental results of this study reveal that generic state-of-the-art deep detectors are not suitable for detecting thin objects due to their reliance on coarse bounding boxes and/or excessive pixel-level computations while the application-specific detectors possess poor generalization capabilities and do not work accurately outside their domains. These empirical findings indicate the necessity of the identification of critical factors affecting thin objects detection and the subsequent design of a generic thin objects' detector.