WB-DETR: Transformer-Based Detector Without Backbone

Fanfan Liu, Haoran Wei, Wenzhe Zhao, Guozhen Li, Jingquan Peng, Zihao Li; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021, pp. 2979-2987

Transformer-based detector is a new paradigm in object detection, which aims to achieve pretty-well performance while eliminates the priori knowledge driven components, e.g., anchors, proposals and the NMS. DETR, the state-of-the-art model among them, is composed of three sub-modules, i.e., a CNN-based backbone and paired transformer encoder-decoder. The CNN is applied to extract local features and the transformer is used to capture global contexts. This pipeline, however, is not concise enough. In this paper, we propose WB-DETR (DETR-based detector Without Backbone) to prove that the reliance on CNN features extraction for a transformer-based detector is not necessary. Unlike the original DETR, WB-DETR is composed of only an encoder and a decoder without CNN backbone. For an input image, WB-DETR serializes it directly to encode the local features into each individual token. To make up the deficiency of transformer in modeling local information, we design an LIE-T2T (local information enhancement tokens to token) module to enhance the internal information of tokens after unfolding. Experimental results demonstrate that WB-DETR, the first pure-transformer detector without CNN to our knowledge, yields on par accuracy and faster inference speed with only half number of parameters compared with DETR baseline.