Development and challenges of object detection: A survey

Object detection is a basic vision task that accompanies people’s daily lives all the time. The development of object detection technology has experienced an evolution from traditional-based algorithms to deep learning-based algorithms, which has made a qualitative leap in both detection accuracy and detection speed. With the advancement of deep learning, object detection techniques are increasingly becoming a part of everyday life, with the YOLO series of algorithms being extensively applied in various industries. In this paper, we initially present the frequently utilized datasets and evaluation criteria for object detection. Subsequently, we delve into the evolution of traditional object detection algorithms, highlighting two-stage and one-stage approaches through illustrative examples of classical methods. We also conduct a comprehensive summary and analysis of the detection results obtained by these methods. In addition, we introduce object detection applications in daily life, as well as the importance and some difficulties of these applications. Finally, we analyze and summarize the difficulties and challenges facing the task of object detection, and we look forward to the future development direction of object detection. •This survey is an extended version of our paper in ICIC2023.•We review the development and challenges of object detection.•We present the application of object detection and make prospects for the future.