DETRs with Hybrid Matching

One-to-one set matching is a key design for DETR to establish its end-to-end capability, so that object detection does not require a hand-crafted NMS (non-maximum suppression) method to remove duplicate detections. This end-to-end signature is important for the versatility of DETR, and it has been generalized to a wide range of visual problems, including instance/semantic segmentation, human pose estimation, and point cloud/multi-view-images based detection, etc. However, we note that because there are too few queries assigned as positive samples, the one-to-one set matching significantly reduces the training efficiency of positive samples. This paper proposes a simple yet effective method based on a hybrid matching scheme that combines the original one-to-one matching branch with auxiliary queries that use one-to-many matching loss during training. This hybrid strategy has been shown to significantly improve training efficiency and improve accuracy. In inference, only the original one-to-one match branch is used, thus maintaining the end-to-end merit and the same inference efficiency of DETR. The method is named $\mathcal{H}$-DETR, and it shows that a wide range of representative DETR methods can be consistently improved across a wide range of visual tasks, including Deformable-DETR, 3DETR/PETRv2, PETR, and TransTrack, among others. Code will be available at: https://github.com/HDETR