Papers › Aligning Object Detector Bounding Boxes with Human Preference

Aligning Object Detector Bounding Boxes with Human Preference

20 Aug 2024arXiv:2408.10844archive 2025-07-28

Ombretta Strafforello, Osman S. Kayhan, Oana Inel, Klamer Schutte, Jan van Gemert

Previous work shows that humans tend to prefer large bounding boxes over small bounding boxes with the same IoU. However, we show here that commonly used object detectors predict large and small boxes equally often. In this work, we investigate how to align automatically detected object boxes with human preference and study whether this improves human quality perception. We evaluate the performance of three commonly used object detectors through a user study (N = 123). We find that humans prefer object detections that are upscaled with factors of 1.5 or 2, even if the corresponding AP is close to 0. Motivated by this result, we propose an asymmetric bounding box regression loss that encourages large over small predicted bounding boxes. Our evaluation study shows that object detectors fine-tuned with the asymmetric loss are better aligned with human preference and are preferred over fixed scaling factors. A qualitative evaluation shows that human preference might be influenced by some object characteristics, like object shape.

PaperPDFCode

Code

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Object

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

ALIGN

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections