What is object detection?

  • 3 minutes

Let's look at example of object detection. Consider the following image:

Various pieces of fruit

An object detection model might be used to identify the individual objects in this image and return the following information:

A banana, and orange, and an apple, each indicated by a bounding box and a probability score

Notice that an object detection model returns the following information:

  • The class of each object identified in the image.
  • The probability score of the object classification (which you can interpret as the confidence of the predicted class being correct)
  • The coordinates of a bounding box for each object.

Note

Object detection vs. image classification

Image classification is a machine learning based form of computer vision in which a model is trained to categorize images based on the primary subject matter they contain. Object detection goes further than this to classify individual objects within the image, and to return the coordinates of a bounding box that indicates the object's location.