Object detection deep dive 15 questions 25 min

Object Detection MCQ · test your knowledge

From bounding boxes to YOLOv8 – 15 questions covering anchor boxes, NMS, mAP, and modern detectors.

Easy: 5 Medium: 6 Hard: 4
Bounding boxes
Anchor boxes
Feature pyramids
mAP

Object detection: locate and classify

Object detection combines classification and localization. Models predict bounding boxes and class labels for multiple objects in an image. This MCQ covers both one‑stage (YOLO, SSD) and two‑stage detectors (Faster R‑CNN), anchor mechanisms, evaluation metrics (mAP), and post‑processing like Non‑Maximum Suppression (NMS).

Why object detection matters

From autonomous vehicles to medical imaging, object detection powers countless applications by providing spatial understanding of scenes.

Object detection glossary – key concepts

Bounding box

Rectangular region defined by (x, y, width, height) or (x1, y1, x2, y2) that encloses an object.

Anchor boxes

Predefined boxes of various scales/aspect ratios used as references for predicting object locations.

YOLO (You Only Look Once)

One‑stage detector that treats detection as a regression problem, extremely fast.

SSD (Single Shot Detector)

One‑stage detector using multi‑scale feature maps for predictions.

Faster R‑CNN

Two‑stage detector: Region Proposal Network (RPN) then classification/regression heads.

Non‑Maximum Suppression (NMS)

Post‑processing to remove duplicate detections based on IoU and confidence.

mAP (mean Average Precision)

Primary metric for object detection, averaging precision across IoU thresholds and classes.

IoU (Intersection over Union)

Measures overlap between predicted and ground‑truth boxes.

# IoU calculation (NumPy style)
def iou(box1, box2):
    x1 = max(box1[0], box2[0])
    y1 = max(box1[1], box2[1])
    x2 = min(box1[2], box2[2])
    y2 = min(box1[3], box2[3])
    inter = max(0, x2-x1) * max(0, y2-y1)
    area1 = (box1[2]-box1[0])*(box1[3]-box1[1])
    area2 = (box2[2]-box2[0])*(box2[3]-box2[1])
    union = area1 + area2 - inter
    return inter / union
Interview tip: Be prepared to compare one‑stage vs two‑stage detectors, explain how anchor boxes work, discuss the role of NMS, and interpret mAP.

Common object detection interview questions

  • What is the difference between one‑stage and two‑stage detectors?
  • How do anchor boxes help in detecting objects of different shapes?
  • Explain Non‑Maximum Suppression and why we need it.
  • What is mAP and how is it calculated for object detection?
  • How does YOLO perform detection in a single pass?
  • What is the role of the Region Proposal Network in Faster R‑CNN?