SYSTEMS AND METHODS FOR OCCLUSION HANDLING IN A NEURAL NETWORK VIA ACTIVATION SUBTRACTION

A method for classifying an occluded object includes receiving, by one or more processing circuits, an image of the object that is partially occluded by a foreign object and classifying, by the one or more processing circuits, the object of the image into one of one or more classes of interest via an artificial neural network (ANN) by determining a plurality of neuron activations of neurons of the ANN for one or more foreign classes and the one or more classes of interest, subtracting one or more of the neuron activations of the one or more foreign classes from the neuron activations of the one or more classes of interest, wherein the foreign object belongs to one of the one or more foreign classes, and classifying the object of the image into the one of the one or more classes of interest based on the subtracting.