  Dropout Variational Inference, or Dropout Sampling, has been recently
proposed as an approximation technique for Bayesian Deep Learning and evaluated
for image classification and regression tasks. This paper investigates the
utility of Dropout Sampling for object detection for the first time. We
demonstrate how label uncertainty can be extracted from a state-of-the-art
object detection system via Dropout Sampling. We evaluate this approach on a
large synthetic dataset of 30,000 images, and a real-world dataset captured by
a mobile robot in a versatile campus environment. We show that this uncertainty
can be utilized to increase object detection performance under the open-set
conditions that are typically encountered in robotic vision. A Dropout Sampling
network is shown to achieve a 12.3% increase in recall (for the same precision
score as a standard network) and a 15.1% increase in precision (for the same
recall score as the standard network).
