DiGeo: Discriminative Geometry-Aware Learning for Generalized Few-Shot Object Detection

Jiawei Ma, Yulei Niu, Jincheng Xu, Shiyuan Huang, Guangxing Han, Shih-Fu Chang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2023, pp. 3208-3218

Generalized few-shot object detection aims to achieve precise detection on both base classes with abundant annotations and novel classes with limited training data. Existing approaches enhance few-shot generalization with the sacrifice of base-class performance, or maintain high precision in base-class detection with limited improvement in novel-class adaptation. In this paper, we point out the reason is insufficient Discriminative feature learning for all of the classes. As such, we propose a new training framework, DiGeo, to learn Geometry-aware features of inter-class separation and intra-class compactness. To guide the separation of feature clusters, we derive an offline simplex equiangular tight frame (ETF) classifier whose weights serve as class centers and are maximally and equally separated. To tighten the cluster for each class, we include adaptive class-specific margins into the classification loss and encourage the features close to the class centers. Experimental studies on two few-shot benchmark datasets (PASCAL VOC, MSCOCO) and one long-tail dataset (LVIS) demonstrate that, with a single model, our method can effectively improve generalization on novel classes without hurting the detection of base classes.