Dropout Sampling for Robust Object Detection in Open-Set Conditions.

Dropout Variational Inference, or Dropout Sampling, has been recently proposed as an approximation technique for Bayesian Deep Learning and evaluated for image classification and regression tasks. This paper investigates the utility of Dropout Sampling for object detection for the first time. We demonstrate how label uncertainty can be extracted from a state-of-the-art object detection system via Dropout Sampling. We show that this uncertainty can be utilized to increase object detection performance under the open-set conditions that are typically encountered in robotic vision. We evaluate this approach on a large synthetic dataset with 30,000 images, and a real-world dataset captured by a mobile robot in a versatile campus environment.