Abstract Low-light is an inescapable element of our daily surroundings that greatly affects the efficiency of our vision. Research works on low-light imagery have seen a steady growth, particularly in the field of image enhancement, but there is still a lack of a go-to database as a benchmark. Besides, research fields that may assist us in low-light environments, such as object detection, has glossed over this aspect even though breakthroughs-after-breakthroughs had been achieved in recent years, most noticeably from the lack of low-light data (less than 2 of the total images) in successful public benchmark datasets such as PASCAL VOC, ImageNet, and Microsoft COCO. Thus, we propose the Exclusively Dark dataset to elevate this data drought. It consists exclusively of low-light images captured in visible light only, with image and object level annotations. Moreover, we share insightful findings in regards to the effects of low-light on the object detection task by analyzing the visualizations of both hand-crafted and learned features. We found that the effects of low-light reach far deeper into the features than can be solved by simple “illumination invariance”. It is our hope that this analysis and the Exclusively Dark dataset can encourage the growth in low-light domain researches on different fields. The dataset can be downloaded at https: github.com cs-chan Exclusively-Dark-Image-Dataset .
The Pascal Visual Object Classes (VOC) challenge is a benchmark in visual object category recognition and detection, providing the vision and machine learning communities with a standard dataset of images and annotation, and standard evaluation procedures. Organised annually from 2005 to present, the challenge and its associated dataset has become accepted as the benchmark for object detection. This paper describes the dataset and evaluation procedure. We review the state-of-the-art in evaluated methods for both classification and detection, analyse whether the methods are statistically different, what they are learning from the images (e.g. the object or its context), and what the methods find easy or confuse. The paper concludes with lessons learnt in the three year history of the challenge, and proposes directions for future improvement and extension.