Can We Challenge Open-Vocabulary Object Detectors with Generated Content in Street Scenes?

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Mütze, Annika, Ilyas, Sadia, Dörpelkus, Christian, Rottmann, Matthias
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Mütze, Annika
Ilyas, Sadia
Dörpelkus, Christian
Rottmann, Matthias
author_facet Mütze, Annika
Ilyas, Sadia
Dörpelkus, Christian
Rottmann, Matthias
contents Open-vocabulary object detectors such as Grounding DINO are trained on vast and diverse data, achieving remarkable performance on challenging datasets. Due to that, it is unclear where to find their limitations, which is of major concern when using in safety-critical applications. Real-world data does not provide sufficient control, required for a rigorous evaluation of model generalization. In contrast, synthetically generated data allows to systematically explore the boundaries of model competence/generalization. In this work, we address two research questions: 1) Can we challenge open-vocabulary object detectors with generated image content? 2) Can we find systematic failure modes of those models? To address these questions, we design two automated pipelines using stable diffusion to inpaint unusual objects with high diversity in semantics, by sampling multiple substantives from WordNet and ChatGPT. On the synthetically generated data, we evaluate and compare multiple open-vocabulary object detectors as well as a classical object detector. The synthetic data is derived from two real-world datasets, namely LostAndFound, a challenging out-of-distribution (OOD) detection benchmark, and the NuImages dataset. Our results indicate that inpainting can challenge open-vocabulary object detectors in terms of overlooking objects. Additionally, we find a strong dependence of open-vocabulary models on object location, rather than on object semantics. This provides a systematic approach to challenge open-vocabulary models and gives valuable insights on how data could be acquired to effectively improve these models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_23751
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Can We Challenge Open-Vocabulary Object Detectors with Generated Content in Street Scenes?
Mütze, Annika
Ilyas, Sadia
Dörpelkus, Christian
Rottmann, Matthias
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Open-vocabulary object detectors such as Grounding DINO are trained on vast and diverse data, achieving remarkable performance on challenging datasets. Due to that, it is unclear where to find their limitations, which is of major concern when using in safety-critical applications. Real-world data does not provide sufficient control, required for a rigorous evaluation of model generalization. In contrast, synthetically generated data allows to systematically explore the boundaries of model competence/generalization. In this work, we address two research questions: 1) Can we challenge open-vocabulary object detectors with generated image content? 2) Can we find systematic failure modes of those models? To address these questions, we design two automated pipelines using stable diffusion to inpaint unusual objects with high diversity in semantics, by sampling multiple substantives from WordNet and ChatGPT. On the synthetically generated data, we evaluate and compare multiple open-vocabulary object detectors as well as a classical object detector. The synthetic data is derived from two real-world datasets, namely LostAndFound, a challenging out-of-distribution (OOD) detection benchmark, and the NuImages dataset. Our results indicate that inpainting can challenge open-vocabulary object detectors in terms of overlooking objects. Additionally, we find a strong dependence of open-vocabulary models on object location, rather than on object semantics. This provides a systematic approach to challenge open-vocabulary models and gives valuable insights on how data could be acquired to effectively improve these models.
title Can We Challenge Open-Vocabulary Object Detectors with Generated Content in Street Scenes?
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.23751