The improvement of ground truth annotation in public datasets for human detection

Abstract

The quality of annotations in the datasets is crucial for supervised machine learning as it significantly affects the performance of models. While many public datasets are widely used, they often suffer from annotations errors, including missing annotations, incorrect bounding box sizes, and positions. It results in low accuracy of machine learning models. However, most researchers have traditionally focused on improving model performance by enhancing algorithms, while overlooking concerns regarding data quality. This so-called model-centric AI approach has been predominant. In contrast, a data-centric AI approach, advocated by Andrew Ng at the DATA and AI Summit 2022, emphasizes enhancing data quality while keeping the model fixed, which proves to be more efficient in improving performance. Building upon this data-centric approach, we propose a method to enhance the quality of public datasets such as MS-COCO and Open Image Dataset. Our approach involves automatically retrieving missing annotations and correcting the size and position of existing bounding boxes in these datasets. Specifically, our study deals with human object detection, which is one of the prominent applications of artificial intelligence. Experimental results demonstrate improved performance with models such as Faster-RCNN, EfficientDet, and RetinaNet. We can achieve up to 32% compared to original datasets in the term of mAP after applying both proposed methods to dataset which is transformed the grouped of instances to individual instance. In summary, our methods significantly enhance the model’s performance by improving the quality of annotations at a lower cost with less time than manual improvement employed in other studies.