Confidence Score: The Forgotten Dimension of Object Detection Performance Evaluation

• Main Authors: Simon Wenkel, Khaled Alhazmi, Tanel Liiv, Saud Alrshoud, Martin Simon
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021-06-01
• Series: Sensors
• Subjects: computer vision; deep neural networks; object detection; confidence score
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/21/13/4350

When deploying a model for object detection, a confidence score threshold is chosen to filter out false positives and ensure that a predicted bounding box has a certain minimum score. To achieve state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets, most neural networks use a rather low threshold as a high number of false positives is not penalized by standard evaluation metrics. However, in scenarios of Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications that require high confidence scores (e.g., due to legal requirements or consequences of incorrect detections are severe) or a certain level of model robustness is required, it is unclear which base model to use since they were mainly optimized for benchmark scores. In this paper, we propose a method to find the optimum performance point of a model as a basis for fairer comparison and deeper insights into the trade-offs caused by selecting a confidence score threshold.