# On the Complexity of Object Detection on Real-world Public Transportation Images for Social Distancing Measurement

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.06639 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06639/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Feb 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [Object Detection in 20 Years: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05055/) (2019)
- [Deep Learning for Generic Object Detection: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02165/) (2018)
- [Monitoring COVID-19 social distancing with person detection and tracking via fine-tuned YOLO v3 and Deepsort techniques](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.01385/) (2020)
- [A Vision-based Social Distancing and Critical Density Detection System for COVID-19](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.03578/) (2020)
- [DeepSOCIAL: Social Distancing Monitoring and Infection Risk Assessment in COVID-19 Pandemic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.11672/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Social distancing in public spaces has become an essential aspect in helping to reduce the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Exploiting recent advances in machine learning, there have been many studies in the literature implementing social distancing via object detection through the use of surveillance cameras in public spaces. However, to date, there has been no study of social distance measurement on public transport. The public transport setting has some unique challenges, including some low-resolution images and camera locations that can lead to the partial occlusion of passengers, which make it challenging to perform accurate detection. Thus, in this paper, we investigate the challenges of performing accurate social distance measurement on public transportation. We benchmark several state-of-the-art object detection algorithms using real-world footage taken from the London Underground and bus network. The work highlights the complexity of performing social distancing measurement on images from current public transportation onboard cameras. Further, exploiting domain knowledge of expected passenger behaviour, we attempt to improve the quality of the detections using various strategies and show improvement over using vanilla object detection alone.