Photon-Limited Object Detection Using Non-Local Feature Matching and Knowledge Distillation

Chengxi Li, Xiangyu Qu, Abhiram Gnanasambandam, Omar A. Elgendy, Jiaju Ma, Stanley H. Chan; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) Workshops, 2021, pp. 3976-3987

Robust object detection under photon-limited conditions is crucial for applications such as night vision, surveillance, and microscopy, where the number of photons per pixel is low due to a dark environment and/or a short integration time. While the mainstream "low-light" image enhancement methods have produced promising results that improve the image contrast between the foreground and background through advanced coloring techniques, the more challenging problem of mitigating the photon shot noise inherited from the random Poisson process remains open. In this paper, we present a photon-limited object detection framework by adding two ideas to state-of-the-art object detectors: 1) a space-time non-local module that leverages the spatial-temporal information across an image sequence in the feature space, and 2) knowledge distillation in the form of student-teacher learning to improve the robustness of the detector's feature extractor against noise. Experiments are conducted to demonstrate the improved performance of the proposed method in comparison with state-of-the-art baselines. When integrated with the latest photon counting devices, the algorithm achieves more than 50% mean average precision at a photon level of 1 photon per pixel.