Efficient Object Detection Algorithm in Kitchen Appliance Scene Images Based on Deep Learning

The accuracy of object detection based on kitchen appliance scene images can suffer severely from external disturbances such as various levels of specular reflection, uneven lighting, and spurious lighting, as well as internal scene-related disturbances such as invalid edges and pattern information unrelated to the object of interest. The present study addresses these unique challenges by proposing an object detection method based on improved faster R-CNN algorithm. The improved method can identify object regions scattered in various areas of complex appliance scenes quickly and automatically. In this paper, we put forward a feature enhancement framework, named deeper region proposal network (D-RPN). In D-RPN, a feature enhancement module is designed to more effectively extract feature information of an object on kitchen appliance scene. Then, we reconstruct a U-shaped network structure using a series of feature enhancement modules. We have evaluated the proposed D-RPN on the dataset we created. It includes all kinds of kitchen appliance control panels captured in nature scene by image collector. In our experiments, the best-performing object detection method obtained a mean average precision mAP value of 89.84% in the testing dataset. The test results show that the proposed improved algorithm achieves higher detecting accuracy than state-of-the-art object detection methods. Finally, our proposed detection method can further be used in text recognition.