  There has been a recent emergence of sampling-based techniques for estimating
epistemic uncertainty in deep neural networks. While these methods can be
applied to classification or semantic segmentation tasks by simply averaging
samples, this is not the case for object detection, where detection sample
bounding boxes must be accurately associated and merged. A weak merging
strategy can significantly degrade the performance of the detector and yield an
unreliable uncertainty measure. This paper provides the first in-depth
investigation of the effect of different association and merging strategies. We
compare different combinations of three spatial and two semantic affinity
measures with four clustering methods for MC Dropout with a Single Shot
Multi-Box Detector. Our results show that the correct choice of
affinity-clustering combination can greatly improve the effectiveness of the
classification and spatial uncertainty estimation and the resulting object
detection performance. We base our evaluation on a new mix of datasets that
emulate near open-set conditions (semantically similar unknown classes),
distant open-set conditions (semantically dissimilar unknown classes) and the
common closed-set conditions (only known classes).
