Incremental Few-Shot Object Detection via Simple Fine-Tuning Approach

In this paper, we explore incremental few-shot object detection (iFSD), which incrementally learns novel classes using only a few examples without revisiting base classes. Previous iFSD works achieved the desired results by applying meta-learning. However, meta-learning approaches show insufficient performance that is difficult to apply to practical problems. In this light, we propose a simple fine-tuning-based approach, the Incremental Two-stage Fine-tuning Approach (iTFA) for iFSD, which contains three steps: 1) base training using abundant base classes with the class-agnostic box regressor, 2) separation of the RoI feature extractor and classifier into the base and novel class branches for preserving base knowledge, and 3) fine-tuning the novel branch using only a few novel class examples. We evaluate our iTFA on the real-world datasets PASCAL VOC, COCO, and LVIS. iTFA achieves competitive performance in COCO and shows a 30% higher AP accuracy than meta-learning methods in the LVIS dataset. Experimental results show the effectiveness and applicability of our proposed method.