# EC-IoU: Orienting Safety for Object Detectors via Ego-Centric Intersection-over-Union

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.15474 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15474/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [Generalized Intersection over Union: A Metric and A Loss for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09630/) (2019)
- [Center-based 3D Object Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11275/) (2020)
- [BEVFusion: Multi-Task Multi-Sensor Fusion with Unified Bird's-Eye View Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13542/) (2022)
- [Distance-IoU Loss: Faster and Better Learning for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08287/) (2019)
- [FCOS3D: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Monocular 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10956/) (2021)
- [UnitBox: An Advanced Object Detection Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.01471/) (2016)
- [SMOKE: Single-Stage Monocular 3D Object Detection via Keypoint Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10111/) (2020)
- [Probabilistic and Geometric Depth: Detecting Objects in Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.14160/) (2021)
- [3D Object Detection for Autonomous Driving: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09474/) (2022)
- [SSN: Shape Signature Networks for Multi-class Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02774/) (2020)
- [3D Object Detection from Images for Autonomous Driving: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.02980/) (2022)
- [Focal and Efficient IOU Loss for Accurate Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.08158/) (2021)
- [Recent Advances in Deep Learning for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03673/) (2019)
- [LET-3D-AP: Longitudinal Error Tolerant 3D Average Precision for Camera-Only 3D Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07705/) (2022)
- [Alpha-IoU: A Family of Power Intersection over Union Losses for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13675/) (2021)
- [Revisiting 3D Object Detection From an Egocentric Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07787/) (2021)
- [Safety-Aware Hardening of 3D Object Detection Neural Network Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.11242/) (2020)
- [Unaligned but Safe -- Formally Compensating Performance Limitations for Imprecise 2D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05123/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Contour Errors: Ego-Centric Matching for 3D Multi-Object Tracking Performance Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04122/) (2025)
- [Safety-Aligned 3D Object Detection: Single-Vehicle, Cooperative, and End-to-End Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.03325/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents Ego-Centric Intersection-over-Union (EC-IoU), addressing the limitation of the standard IoU measure in characterizing safety-related performance for object detectors in navigating contexts. Concretely, we propose a weighting mechanism to refine IoU, allowing it to assign a higher score to a prediction that covers closer points of a ground-truth object from the ego agent's perspective. The proposed EC-IoU measure can be used in typical evaluation processes to select object detectors with better safety-related performance for downstream tasks. It can also be integrated into common loss functions for model fine-tuning. While geared towards safety, our experiment with the KITTI dataset demonstrates the performance of a model trained on EC-IoU can be better than that of a variant trained on IoU in terms of mean Average Precision as well.