LightMDETR: A Lightweight Approach for Low-Cost Open-Vocabulary Object Detection Training

Object detection in computer vision traditionally involves identifying objects in images. By integrating textual descriptions, we enhance this process, providing better context and accuracy. The MDETR model significantly advances this by combining image and text data for more versatile object detection and classification. However, MDETR's complexity and high computational demands hinder its practical use. In this paper, we introduce Lightweight MDETR (LightMDETR), an optimized MDETR variant designed for improved computational efficiency while maintaining robust multimodal capabilities. Our approach involves freezing the MDETR backbone and training a sole component, the Deep Fusion Encoder (DFE), to represent image and text modalities. A learnable context vector enables the DFE to switch between these modalities. Evaluation on datasets like RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, and RefCOCOg demonstrates that LightMDETR achieves superior precision and accuracy.