Scoring Detectors and Trackers

http://www.viametoolkit.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/scoring-2.png

This document corresponds to this example online, in addition to the scoring_and_roc_generation example folder in a VIAME installation.

The KWANT package provides scoring tools that can be used to calculate the probability of detecting an item, along with other scoring metrics such as ROC curves, specificity, sensitivities, etc. The input to these tools must be in the Kitware kw18 format. Several scripts are provided to convert other formats (such as habcam annotations and Scallop-tk outputs) to kw18 format. The format is very simple so additional converters can be easily created.

An example of running scoring tools can be found here. The scoring tool takes two files: the actual detections in the truth file and the computed detections. The computed detections are scored against the truth file to give a set of statistics as shown below. Additional parameters that can be passed to the tool and other options can be found in the KWANT documentation.

HADWAV Scoring Results:
   Detection-Pd: 0.748387
   Detection-FA: 8
   Detection-PFA: 0.0338983
   Frame-NFAR: not computed
   Track-Pd: 0.748387
   Track-FA: 8
   Computed-track-PFA: 0.0338983
   Track-NFAR: not computed
   Avg track (continuity, purity ): 13.693, 1
   Avg target (continuity, purity ): 20.1419, 0.748387
   Track-frame-precision: 0.947826

The tool was originally written to analyze object tracks in full motion video imagery so some of the terminology and calculated metrics may not apply.

One main metric is the probability of detection Pd. This is calculated as follows:

Pd = (num detections match truth) / (num truth)

Detection files can be written in the kw18 format by using the appropriate writer in the pipeline or by running one of these converters. One downside to using the kw18 writer in the pipeline is that the image file name is not captured. All the converters take the same set of command line options. For example:

Usage: habcam_to_kw18.pl [opts] file
  Options:
    --help                     print usage
    --write-file file-name     Write image file/index correspondence to file
    --read-file  file-name     Read image file/index correspondence to file

In order to get the best statistics the number of images processed must be the same as the number of images in the truth set. Computed detections and truth are compared on an image basis so the number of truth entries must be limited to the same number of images as the computed detections. The options to these converters aide in this regard.

Calculated detections are converted first and use the –out-file option to write out the list of files processed. The truth set is processed next with the –in-file option referring to the file created in the previous step. The –cache-only flag should be added to this second conversion to cause images not in the first step to be skipped.

The score_tracks tool is run as follows:

score_tracks --computed-tracks computed_det.kw18 --truth-tracks ground_truth2.kw18

A full list of the options can be coaxed from the tool by using the -? option.