Object Detection under Challenging Lighting Conditions using High Dynamic Range imagery

Most Convolution Neural Network (CNN) based object detectors, to date, have been optimized for accuracy and/or detection performance on datasets typically comprised of well exposed 8-bits/pixel/channel Standard Dynamic Range (SDR) images. A major existing challenge in this area is to accurately detect objects under extreme/difficult lighting conditions as SDR image trained detectors fail to accurately detect objects under such challenging lighting conditions. In this paper, we address this issue for the first time by introducing High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging to object detection. HDR imagery can capture and process ≈13 orders of magnitude of scene dynamic range similar to the human eye. HDR trained models are therefore able to extract more salient features from extreme lighting conditions leading to more accurate detections. However, introducing HDR also presents multiple new challenges such as the complete absence of resources and previous literature on such an approach. Here, we introduce a methodology to generate a large scale annotated HDR dataset from any existing SDR dataset and validate the quality of the generated dataset via a robust evaluation technique. We also discuss the challenges of training and validating HDR trained models using existing detectors. Finally, we provide a methodology to create an out of distribution (OOD) HDR dataset to test and compare the performance of HDR and SDR trained detectors under difficult lighting condition. Results suggest that using the proposed methodology, HDR trained models are able to achieve 10 – 12% more accuracy compared to SDR trained models on real-world OOD dataset consisting of high-contrast images under extreme lighting conditions.