Exploring Effective Knowledge Transfer for Few-shot Object Detection

Recently, few-shot object detection~(FSOD) has received much attention from the community, and many methods are proposed to address this problem from a knowledge transfer perspective. Though promising results have been achieved, these methods fail to achieve shot-stable:~methods that excel in low-shot regimes are likely to struggle in high-shot regimes, and vice versa. We believe this is because the primary challenge of FSOD changes when the number of shots varies. In the low-shot regime, the primary challenge is the lack of inner-class variation. In the high-shot regime, as the variance approaches the real one, the main hindrance to the performance comes from misalignment between learned and true distributions. However, these two distinct issues remain unsolved in most existing FSOD methods. In this paper, we propose to overcome these challenges by exploiting rich knowledge the model has learned and effectively transferring them to the novel classes. For the low-shot regime, we propose a distribution calibration method to deal with the lack of inner-class variation problem. Meanwhile, a shift compensation method is proposed to compensate for possible distribution shift during fine-tuning. For the high-shot regime, we propose to use the knowledge learned from ImageNet as guidance for the feature learning in the fine-tuning stage, which will implicitly align the distributions of the novel classes. Although targeted toward different regimes, these two strategies can work together to further improve the FSOD performance. Experiments on both the VOC and COCO benchmarks show that our proposed method can significantly outperform the baseline method and produce competitive results in both low-shot settings (shot<5) and high-shot settings (shot>=5). Code is available at https://github.com/JulioZhao97/EffTrans_Fsdet.git.