Advanced efficient strategy for detection of dark objects based on spiking network with multi-box detection

Several deep learning algorithms have shown amazing performance for existing object detection tasks, but recognizing darker objects is the largest challenge. Moreover, those techniques struggled to detect or had a slow recognition rate, resulting in significant performance losses. As a result, an improved and accurate detection approach is required to address the above difficulty. The whole study proposes a combination of spiked and normal convolution layers as an energy-efficient and reliable object detector model. The proposed model is split into two sections. The first section is developed as a feature extractor, which utilizes pre-trained VGG16, and the second section of the proposal structure is the combination of spiked and normal Convolutional layers to detect the bounding boxes of images. We drew a pre-trained model for classifying detected objects. With state of the art Python libraries, spike layers can be trained efficiently. The proposed spike convolutional object detector (SCOD) has been evaluated on VOC and Ex-Dark datasets. SCOD reached 66.01% and 41.25% mAP for detecting 20 different objects in the VOC-12 and 12 objects in the Ex-Dark dataset. SCOD uses 14 Giga FLOPS for its forward path calculations. Experimental results indicated superior performance compared to Tiny YOLO, Spike YOLO, YOLO-LITE, Tinier YOLO and Center of loc + Xception based on mAP for the VOC dataset.