Perception

Bounding Box

A bounding box is a rectangular region, axis-aligned or oriented, in 2D images or as a cuboid in 3D space, that localizes a detected object, forming the standard output representation of object detectors from Faster R-CNN and YOLO to DETR-style transformers. Open-vocabulary detectors now produce boxes for arbitrary text queries, and 3D boxes with position, size, and heading are the lingua franca of autonomous driving perception.

Why it matters for physical AI

Boxes are the interface through which detection feeds grasping, tracking, and language grounding in robot pipelines, though their coarseness relative to masks and poses limits fine manipulation, motivating richer representations.