"A Simple Approach and Benchmark for 21,000-Category Object Detection"

Yutong Lin, Chen Li, Yue Cao, Zheng Zhang, Jianfeng Wang, Lijuan Wang, Zicheng Liu, Han Hu ;

"Current object detection systems and benchmarks typically handle a limited number of categories, up to about a thousand categories. This paper scales the number of categories for object detection systems and benchmarks up to 21,000, by leveraging existing object detection and image classification data. Unlike previous efforts that usually transfer knowledge from base detectors to image classification data, we propose to rely more on a reverse information flow from a base image classifier to object detection data. In this framework, the large-vocabulary classification capability is first learnt thoroughly using only the image classification data. In this step, the image classification problem is reformulated as a special configuration of object detection that treats the entire image as a special RoI. Then, a simple multi-task learning approach is used to join the image classification and object detection data, with the backbone and the RoI classification branch shared between two tasks. This two-stage approach, though very simple without a sophisticated process such as multi-instance learning (MIL) to generate pseudo labels for object proposals on the image classification data, performs rather strongly that it surpasses previous large-vocabulary object detection systems on a standard evaluation protocol of tailored LVIS. Considering that the tailored LVIS evaluation only accounts for a few hundred novel object categories, we present a new evaluation benchmark that assesses the detection of all 21,841 object classes in the ImageNet-21K dataset. The baseline approach and evaluation benchmark will be publicly available at https://github.com/SwinTransformer/Simple-21K-Detection. We hope these would ease future research on large-vocabulary object detection."