Meta-Learning to Detect Rare Objects

Yu-Xiong Wang, Deva Ramanan, Martial Hebert; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019, pp. 9925-9934

Abstract


Few-shot learning, i.e., learning novel concepts from few examples, is fundamental to practical visual recognition systems. While most of existing work has focused on few-shot classification, we make a step towards few-shot object detection, a more challenging yet under-explored task. We develop a conceptually simple but powerful meta-learning based framework that simultaneously tackles few-shot classification and few-shot localization in a unified, coherent way. This framework leverages meta-level knowledge about "model parameter generation" from base classes with abundant data to facilitate the generation of a detector for novel classes. Our key insight is to disentangle the learning of category-agnostic and category-specific components in a CNN based detection model. In particular, we introduce a weight prediction meta-model that enables predicting the parameters of category-specific components from few examples. We systematically benchmark the performance of modern detectors in the small-sample size regime. Experiments in a variety of realistic scenarios, including within-domain, cross-domain, and long-tailed settings, demonstrate the effectiveness and generality of our approach under different notions of novel classes.

Related Material


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[bibtex]
@InProceedings{Wang_2019_ICCV,
author = {Wang, Yu-Xiong and Ramanan, Deva and Hebert, Martial},
title = {Meta-Learning to Detect Rare Objects},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
month = {October},
year = {2019}
}