# A Comprehensive Study of Real-Time Object Detection Networks Across Multiple Domains: A Survey

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.10895 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10895/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 60 of its 80 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Aug 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 60)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [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)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Towards Deep Learning Models Resistant to Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.06083/) (2017)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (2017)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02357/) (2016)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [Shortcut Learning in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07780/) (2020)
- [Decoupled Weight Decay Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05101/) (2017)
- [FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01355/) (2019)
- [Inception-v4, Inception-ResNet and the Impact of Residual Connections on Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07261/) (2016)
- [Deformable Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06211/) (2017)
- [YOLO9000: Better, Faster, Stronger](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08242/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [D-FINE: Redefine Regression Task in DETRs as Fine-grained Distribution Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13842/) (2024)
- [A Survey and Evaluation of Adversarial Attacks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01934/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Performance of Vision Transformers on Small Datasets through Local Inductive Bias Incorporation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08551/) (2023)
- [LSFSL: Leveraging Shape Information in Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06672/) (2023)
- [DExT: Detector Explanation Toolkit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.11409/) (2022)
- [Sanity Checks for Saliency Methods Explaining Object Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02424/) (2023)
- [Streaming Object Detection on Fisheye Cameras for Automatic Parking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14713/) (2023)
- [Recognizing Handwritten Mathematical Expressions of Vertical Addition and Subtraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05820/) (2023)
- [MultIOD: Rehearsal-free Multihead Incremental Object Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05334/) (2023)
- [Can We Break Free from Strong Data Augmentations in Self-Supervised Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09752/) (2024)
- [HEViTPose: High-Efficiency Vision Transformer for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13615/) (2023)
- [A Study on Real-time Object Detection using Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.15926/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deep neural network based object detectors are continuously evolving and are used in a multitude of applications, each having its own set of requirements. While safety-critical applications need high accuracy and reliability, low-latency tasks need resource and energy-efficient networks. Real-time detectors, which are a necessity in high-impact real-world applications, are continuously proposed, but they overemphasize the improvements in accuracy and speed while other capabilities such as versatility, robustness, resource and energy efficiency are omitted. A reference benchmark for existing networks does not exist, nor does a standard evaluation guideline for designing new networks, which results in ambiguous and inconsistent comparisons. We, thus, conduct a comprehensive study on multiple real-time detectors (anchor-, keypoint-, and transformer-based) on a wide range of datasets and report results on an extensive set of metrics. We also study the impact of variables such as image size, anchor dimensions, confidence thresholds, and architecture layers on the overall performance. We analyze the robustness of detection networks against distribution shifts, natural corruptions, and adversarial attacks. Also, we provide a calibration analysis to gauge the reliability of the predictions. Finally, to highlight the real-world impact, we conduct two unique case studies, on autonomous driving and healthcare applications. To further gauge the capability of networks in critical real-time applications, we report the performance after deploying the detection networks on edge devices. Our extensive empirical study can act as a guideline for the industrial community to make an informed choice on the existing networks. We also hope to inspire the research community towards a new direction in the design and evaluation of networks that focuses on a bigger and holistic overview for a far-reaching impact.