An official website of the United States government
Deep-learning (DL)-based object detection algorithms can greatly benefit the community at large in fighting fires, advancing climate intelligence, and reducing health complications caused by hazardous smoke particles. Existing DL-based techniques, which are mostly based on convolutional networks, have proven to be effective in wildfire detection. However, there is still room for improvement. First, existing methods tend to have some commercial aspects, with limited publicly available data and models. In addition, studies aiming at the detection of wildfires at the incipient stage are rare. Smoke columns at this stage tend to be small, shallow, and often far from view, with low visibility. This makes finding and labeling enough data to train an efficient deep learning model very challenging. Finally, the inherent locality of convolution operators limits their ability to model long-range correlations between objects in an image. Recently, encoder–decoder transformers have emerged as interesting solutions beyond natural language processing to help capture global dependencies via self- and inter-attention mechanisms. We propose Nemo: a set of evolving, free, and open-source datasets, processed in standard COCO format, and wildfire smoke and fine-grained smoke density detectors, for use by the research community. We adapt Facebook’s DEtection TRansformer (DETR) to wildfire detection, which results in a much simpler technique, where the detection does not rely on convolution filters and anchors. Nemo is the first open-source benchmark for wildfire smoke density detection and Transformer-based wildfire smoke detection tailored to the early incipient stage. Two popular object detection algorithms (Faster R-CNN and RetinaNet) are used as alternatives and baselines for extensive evaluation. Our results confirm the superior performance of the transformer-based method in wildfire smoke detection across different object sizes. Moreover, we tested our model with 95 video sequences of wildfire starts from the public HPWREN database. Our model detected 97.9% of the fires in the incipient stage and 80% within 5 min from the start. On average, our model detected wildfire smoke within 3.6 min from the start, outperforming the baselines.
more »
« less
This content will become publicly available on May 1, 2026
Understanding differences in applying DETR to natural and medical images
Natural images depict real-world scenes such as landscapes, animals, and everyday items. Transformer-based detectors, such as the Detection Transformer, have demonstrated strong object detection performance on natural image datasets. These models are typically optimized through complex engineering strategies tailored to the characteristics of natural scenes. However, medical imaging presents unique challenges, such as high resolutions, smaller and fewer regions of interest, and subtle inter-class differences, which differ significantly from natural images. In this study, we evaluated the effectiveness of common design choices in transformer-based detectors when applied to medical imaging. Using two representative datasets, a mammography dataset and a chest CT dataset, we showed that common design choices proposed for natural images, including complex encoder architectures, multi-scale feature fusion, query initialization, and iterative bounding box refinement, fail to improve and can even be detrimental to the object detection performance. In contrast, simpler and shallower architectures often achieve equal or superior results with less computational cost. These findings highlight that standard design practices need to be reconsidered when adapting transformer models to medical imaging, and suggest that simplicity may be more effective than added complexity in this domain. Our model code and weights are publicly available at https://github.com/nyukat/Mammo-DETR
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1922658
- PAR ID:
- 10649841
- Publisher / Repository:
- Machine Learning for Biomedical Imaging
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Machine Learning for Biomedical Imaging
- Volume:
- 3
- Issue:
- May 2025
- ISSN:
- 2766-905X
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 152 to 170
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Despite recent progress in Multiple Object Tracking (MOT), several obstacles such as occlusions, similar objects, and complex scenes remain an open challenge. Meanwhile, a systematic study of the cost-performance tradeoff for the popular tracking-by-detection paradigm is still lacking. This paper introduces SMILEtrack, an innovative object tracker that effectively addresses these challenges by integrating an efficient object detector with a Siamese network-based Similarity Learning Module (SLM). The technical contributions of SMILETrack are twofold. First, we propose an SLM that calculates the appearance similarity between two objects, overcoming the limitations of feature descriptors in Separate Detection and Embedding (SDE) models. The SLM incorporates a Patch Self-Attention (PSA) block inspired by the vision Transformer, which generates reliable features for accurate similarity matching. Second, we develop a Similarity Matching Cascade (SMC) module with a novel GATE function for robust object matching across consecutive video frames, further enhancing MOT performance. Together, these innovations help SMILETrack achieve an improved trade-off between the cost (e.g., running speed) and performance (e.g., tracking accuracy) over several existing state-of-the-art benchmarks, including the popular BYTETrack method. SMILETrack outperforms BYTETrack by 0.4-0.8 MOTA and 2.1-2.2 HOTA points on MOT17 and MOT20 datasets. Code is available at http://github.com/pingyang1117/SMILEtrack_official.more » « less
-
e apply a new deep learning technique to detect, classify, and deblend sources in multi-band astronomical images. We train and evaluate the performance of an artificial neural network built on the Mask R-CNN image processing framework, a general code for efficient object detection, classification, and instance segmentation. After evaluating the performance of our network against simulated ground truth images for star and galaxy classes, we find a precision of 92% at 80% recall for stars and a precision of 98% at 80% recall for galaxies in a typical field with ∼30 galaxies/arcmin2. We investigate the deblending capability of our code, and find that clean deblends are handled robustly during object masking, even for significantly blended sources. This technique, or extensions using similar network architectures, may be applied to current and future deep imaging surveys such as LSST and WFIRST. Our code, Astro R-CNN, is publicly available at https://github.com/burke86/astro_rcnnmore » « less
-
Despite significant strides in achieving vehicle autonomy, robust perception under low-light conditions still remains a persistent challenge. In this study, we investigate the potential of multispectral imaging, thereby leveraging deep learning models to enhance object detection performance in the context of nighttime driving. Features encoded from the red, green, and blue (RGB) visual spectrum and thermal infrared images are combined to implement a multispectral object detection model. This has proven to be more effective compared to using visual channels only, as thermal images provide complementary information when discriminating objects in low-illumination conditions. Additionally, there is a lack of studies on effectively fusing these two modalities for optimal object detection performance. In this work, we present a framework based on the Faster R-CNN architecture with a feature pyramid network. Moreover, we design various fusion approaches using concatenation and addition operators at varying stages of the network to analyze their impact on object detection performance. Our experimental results on the KAIST and FLIR datasets show that our framework outperforms the baseline experiments of the unimodal input source and the existing multispectral object detectorsmore » « less
-
Pedestrian Detection in real world crowded areas is still one of the challenging categories in object detection problems. Various mod- ern detection architectures such as Faster R-CNN, R-FCN and SSD has been analyzed based on speed and accuracy measurements. These mod- els can detect multiple objects with overlaps and localize them using a bounding box framing it. Evaluation of performance parameters pro- vides high speed models which can work on live stream applications in mobile devices or high accurate models which provide state-of-the-art performance for various detection problems.These convolutional neural network models are tested on the Penn-Fudan Dataset as well as Google images with occlusions, which achieves high detection accuracies on each of the detectors.more » « less
