Learning to Match Templates for Unseen Instance Detection

Detecting objects in images is a quintessential problem in computer vision. Much of the focus in the literature has been on the problem of identifying the bounding box of a particular type of objects in an image. Yet, in many contexts such as robotics and augmented reality, it is more important to find a specific object instance---a unique toy or a custom industrial part for example---rather than a generic object class. Here, applications can require a rapid shift from one object instance to another, thus requiring fast turnaround which affords little-to-no training time. In this context, we propose a method for detecting objects that are unknown at training time. Our approach frames the problem as one of learned template matching, where a network is trained to match the template of an object in an image. The template is obtained by rendering a textured 3D model of the object. At test time, we provide a novel 3D object, and the network is able to successfully detect it, even under significant occlusion. Our method offers an improvement of almost 30 mAP over the previous template matching methods on the challenging Occluded Linemod (overall mAP of 50.7). With no access to the objects at training time, our method still yields detection results that are on par with existing ones that are allowed to train on the objects. By reviving this research direction in the context of more powerful, deep feature extractors, our work sets the stage for more development in the area of unseen object instance detection.