SSD vs. YOLO for Detection of Outdoor Urban Advertising Panels under Multiple Variabilities

This work compares Single Shot MultiBox Detector (SSD) and You Only Look Once (YOLO) deep neural networks for the outdoor advertisement panel detection problem by handling multiple and combined variabilities in the scenes. Publicity panel detection in images offers important advantages both in the real world as well as in the virtual one. For example, applications like Google Street View can be used for Internet publicity and when detecting these ads panels in images, it could be possible to replace the publicity appearing inside the panels by another from a funding company. In our experiments, both SSD and YOLO detectors have produced acceptable results under variable sizes of panels, illumination conditions, viewing perspectives, partial occlusion of panels, complex background and multiple panels in scenes. Due to the difficulty of finding annotated images for the considered problem, we created our own dataset for conducting the experiments. The major strength of the SSD model was the almost elimination of False Positive (FP) cases, situation that is preferable when the publicity contained inside the panel is analyzed after detecting them. On the other side, YOLO produced better panel localization results detecting a higher number of True Positive (TP) panels with a higher accuracy. Finally, a comparison of the two analyzed object detection models with different types of semantic segmentation networks and using the same evaluation metrics is also included.