Cross-Domain Few-Shot Object Detection via Enhanced Open-Set Object Detector

This paper addresses the challenge of cross-domain few-shot object detection (CD-FSOD), aiming to develop an accurate object detector for novel domains with minimal labeled examples. While transformer-based open-set detectors e.g., DE-ViT~\cite{zhang2023detect} have excelled in both open-vocabulary object detection and traditional few-shot object detection, detecting categories beyond those seen during training, we thus naturally raise two key questions: 1) can such open-set detection methods easily generalize to CD-FSOD? 2) If no, how to enhance the results of open-set methods when faced with significant domain gaps? To address the first question, we introduce several metrics to quantify domain variances and establish a new CD-FSOD benchmark with diverse domain metric values. Some State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) open-set object detection methods are evaluated on this benchmark, with evident performance degradation observed across out-of-domain datasets. This indicates the failure of adopting open-set detectors directly for CD-FSOD. Sequentially, to overcome the performance degradation issue and also to answer the second proposed question, we endeavor to enhance the vanilla DE-ViT. With several novel components including finetuning, a learnable prototype module, and a lightweight attention module, we present an improved Cross-Domain Vision Transformer for CD-FSOD (CD-ViTO). Experiments show that our CD-ViTO achieves impressive results on both out-of-domain and in-domain target datasets, establishing new SOTAs for both CD-FSOD and FSOD. All the datasets, codes, and models will be released to the community.